Expecto quiltonum!

Happy Friday, everybody!  Hope you have had a good week.  This week we had something stunning happen-- there was sunshine for four whole days! Okay, it rained at night, but there was some sunshine during the day, which was super-exciting.  It was also really warm and humid, so even though the calendar says it's fall, I'm not sure that the weather got the message.

I have a fun finish this week, right out of the pages of a book.  Here we go-- swish and flick--

Yay!  It's the quilted and bound Harry Potter quilt that I made for my daughter.  She bought me the pattern, which is from Pieces by Polly and is available HERE.  I finished the top in July and just finished off the quilting this week.

This quilt was fairly easy to assemble, though I did deviate from the pattern a bit.  I'm pretty much incapable of following a pattern exactly.  The only hard part was keeping all the lint and threads off the black fabric.  The black is just a solid black Kona, and let me tell you that it attracts every stray bit of thread and lots of fuzz from the batting.

I quilted this myself, mostly using a walking foot to stitch a quarter inch on each side of the squares.  I changed the thread color for each section, which is one of the perks of doing your own quilts, so the quilting pretty much disappears into the background.  It took forever, really, but it looks good.  There are a few wobbles, but not a single tuck or wrinkle.  Yay me!

I free-motion quilted the crest in the center last, again using matching threads and just doing a small meander.  Janine at Quilts From the Little House does a tiny meander all the time, and I am filled with admiration, because that was really tedious.  I also free-motioned loops in the colorful small border and also added a small surprise in the corner:

That's just red thread on the black border, so it kind of blends and you have to look for it. I chalked in the two circles for the glasses and stitched over them, then just connected them with a little arch.  The lightning bolt was also chalked in because I couldn't wrap my mind around free-handing it.  The rest of the border is just a triple pinstripe.  All of the straight stitching gives it a nice texture on the back:

The backing is a Timeless Treasures map of London print, which is great for a Harry Potter quilt, and the thread colors blend on it pretty well.  Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, and I hope my daughter loves it. 

We will be delivering this quilt to our daughter on our way home this Sunday. This weekend we are heading out to the AQS show in Virginia Beach to see my Misfit Toys quilt hanging.  I'm very excited!  If anyone else is going to  the show on Saturday and would like to meet up for some lunch or just to walk around, drop me an email and we can get together!

Everyone have a great weekend! Hope it's restful, sunny, and dry!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, TGIFF, and crazymomquilts.