Todd Learns to Sew...Better, or Another Day Another Lost Digit

To be fair I have sewn before, but not very well, I made a Han Solo vest for a Halloween costume one year :)  So my crash course to learn how to sew like a pro was to make my mom a quilt.  My mother, Andrea and myself went shopping for fabrics and decided on a nice mixture of red, black and tan.  Andrea was nice enough to lay out a very cool design that consisted mostly of triangles (an easy thing to sew since there are no curves).

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Purchase fabric. Check.  Design the layout. Check.  Read the manual on how to run the machine.  Come on, I am a boy after all.  And in my defense if I break it I already bought it.  

Andrea gave me great lessons on many of the things that I will be running into on this adventure.  I can fill a bobbin, load the bobbin into the machine, thread the machine and needle and jam the pedal to the concrete and go.  Yes, she also made sure I knew what backstitching was and how to make a seam allowance. 

Well with all this new knowledge I am ready to go and start sewing away.  What do you mean "Come over to the cutting table and we can begin"?  Where's the fun in that?

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There's measuring, and marking, and cutting.  Wouldn't be a lot easier if I just got a couple of pieces of fleece and tied the ends together?  We have fleece right over there.  Seriously?  144 squares to cut out?  My mom is only 5 foot tall, couldn't we get by with like half that?  

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So I got all 144 pieces cut out, with a little help from Andrea :)  and started pinning them together, sewing them down the middle twice, cutting them apart, ironing them down, then I had to start attaching all the little squares together to make the four square middle.  So after about 6 thousand hours I ended up with this.  

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The first piece of the puzzle.  This is the center panel of the quilt.
I hope my mommy likes it!