My Christmas table topper is finally completed. I blogged about it in this post – how it was my first real project and how it got set aside and how almost four years later I rediscovered it and decided to finish it.

Besides moving twice in those four years, there were a couple other reasons I didn’t finish it. Although I really liked the teacher of the beginning quilting class I took in 2010, she was a member of the “points police” and made us redo any blocks that had less than perfect points. . I never had to redo any of my piecing, because I spent hours making sure my points were perfect (although now I see some errors on my blocks). I am grateful to my teacher for instilling good “points ethics”, but it created a kind of dread when I thought about finishing. And I was very nervous about quilting it, since the class did not include any quilting instruction. So it sat in a basket.

It wasn’t until I started examining pictures on the blogs of experienced quilters that I realized my points did not have to be perfect and my quilting was going to look good to a non-quilter no matter how elementary it looked to me. The tide began to turn, and now I love every part of making a quilt.

I quilted with no plan, but I am pleased with the way it turned out. Each block has its own quilting pattern. The only thing I would do differently now would be to rearrange the blocks to help balance the two lighter blocks with the two darker blocks. It finished at 26-1/2 inches square.

I toyed with the idea of donating this to our church fall market, but I think I would rather keep it as a reminder of my first class and use it for Christmas. I am linking it to Rachel’s Purge-Along and to Lily’s Quilts Small Blog Meet.