some quilting updates - aka, fatal design error

I finally got the backing fabric for my bird quilt.  And thread to quilt it.  I decided I wanted to quilt this myself.  It can't be that hard, right?

Well, straight lines are harder than they look.  Luckily, my mom sent me the plexiglass table the fits my machine arm so I should have better maneuvering of the quilt now.  I think I might have to take some of these out, but that's okay.

I also spray basted it and I LOVE IT!  I've never really safety pinned a quilt (whatever, I've never quilted really quilted a quilt on this machine), but I can imagine not really liking it.  It was bad enough crawling around on the floor with this enormous belly to get the fabric smoothed out.  I'm excited to keep going on this and see how it turns out.

*****
I also sewed my strips together for the baby's quilt.  And I thought I was being clever with my strips.  Do you see my fatal error?

I made sure in selecting my sets of 3 that each set had a dot in it (except for 2).  Then I smugly thought it would be great to have all the dots in the middle.

Oooooops.  When I layed them out like this, I realized that meant I would have stripes of polka dots running down my quilt.  Not exactly the scrappy unplanned image I had in mind.

Then I realized I could just take a strip off one end and sew it to the other side. This moved the dots  from the middle to an end.  Does that make sense?  I did this for half of my strip sets.  Crisis averted.

Then when I layed it out to get an idea how it's going to look, I saw this:

Much better.  Don't you think?