Finish it up Friday: the Something New Sampler

I'm (finally) done with the Something New Sampler! Some of you have seen this quite a bit, but I'm still showing off a ton of photos since it's finished!!

It's been a bit of a rocky relationship between the two of us....

...but there are so many things I love about this quilt.

Especially the texture washing and drying gives it!

I'm certainly tempted to quilt all my projects to death now, seeing the lovely crinkle.

I absolutely loved trying out so many different quilting designs!

It was a bit of a trick to figure out how to quilt so much background space. I knew I had to break up the large area visually somehow, so I started by marking offset rectangles around the grid of blocks. Then I filled the negative space between the blocks and the rectangles in with pebbling. I picked a special design for each block. I straight-line quilted the rectangles and did some random straight-line quilting (with my FMQ foot) in the negative space outside of the rectangles.

I bound it with a Michael Miller damask print that was in the fabric bundle I used for the blocks. Piglet (my son's lovie) had to photobomb, of course :)

So glad it's done! I'm planning on hanging it in my sewing room. I'm too protective of it to put it on the couch!

Linking up to Finish it up Friday.