Quilting the birthday quilt

Finally...

Just like the cobblers children who never had shoes, sometimes my kids have to wait a long time to get a quilt. Carson has been waiting for his birthday quilt to be quilted for over 4 months now!! There always seams to be another customer quilt that needs to be done first. But today was the day!! I FINALLY assembled the backing, loaded it on my Gammill and got to work!

The birthday quilt loaded onto the Gammill

I made this quilt top by appliquéing large hexagon shapes onto a single piece of fabric using fusible web. The hexagons were cut using my Bullseye Hexagon Die set from Accuquilt. I used the blanket stitch on my sewing machine to stitch down all of the edges. I especially liked the look of the edges that were stitched with the black and white variegated thread - it almost looked like piano keys when it was finished.

After the quilt was loaded on the machine, I selected a variegated grey thread and decided to do a meandering design over the whole quilt, but once I got to the first hexagon, I decided to try out a different design.

As I made my way across the quilt, I tried out more and more designs in each of the hexagons. This quilt was so much fun to quilt as I knew my son would love it even if I made a "mistake". 

Here is the quilt all quilted - now how long is it going to take for me to put binding on it??? Maybe he'll get it by Christmas LOL.