Happy Birthday Baby Boy!!

We had a great time celebrating Chaos' first birthday today! And, though it took a lot of late nights this week, his quilt was finished in time! Here are the pictures:

Front of the quilt


Peek at the backside

I really enjoyed making this quilt (well, the binding almost did me in, but that's a story for another day). I certainly learned a lot.

Here are a few tips I picked up along the way:

1. Quilting gloves are great! They really helped grip and hold the fabric while quilting. This was especially helpful because I was working at a small table and the fabric was pulling and bunching.
2. A quilt that has nothing but corners of squares to line up might not be the best idea for a first quilt. In hindsight, I should have offset the squares so there were no corners to line up.
3. I had NO idea how to bind a quilt. I had read lots of books and tutorials and just didn't understand them. Until I found this one from Crazy Mom Quilts . Made perfect sense.
4. I also had no idea how to blindstitch the binding on to the back of the quilt. YouTube. Great video demonstration. Almost as good as having a teacher next to you.

On a different note, Pinky and I made a dirt and worm cake for the party. I thought it would be really cute to serve it in a dump truck. Here's a picture of how it turned out (it tasted awesome!!). The smaller truck is his smash cake. While he was eating it he was also "driving" the truck. Too cute!

Okay, one last picture before I go pass out from sheer exhaustion...I have to include the birthday boy, Mr. Chaos himself - checking out the decorations and hoopla for the first time.