Erin's quilt

Goddaughter Erin graduated from high school last week.  Hard to believe she's past that milestone already! I made this dragonfly/butterfly quilt for her to commemorate the occasion.  It took me about 3 weeks to decide on the basic fabrics.  After several trials with different materials, I finally found this dragonfly print that I could fussy-cut a dragonfly for each center square.  The quilt pattern is Tennessee Waltz, which is great for Erin as her mom went to school in Nashville and she and Erin often go back there to visit friends.

Lessons learned from this quilt:

• don't use white-on-white type fabric where the top layer isn't woven in... almost looks like it's painted on.  This fabric was not very forgiving; when you take stitches out, they still show in the "painted" part.
• I actually CAN do picture-type machine quilting!  I did dragonflies and butterflies in most of the white squares, and even did Erin's monogram in 4 corner white squares
• DO NOT leave an unfinished quilt sitting out in the workroom ... well, at least MY workroom.  I was almost done with the quilting, and a mouse decided it liked my quilt. It chewed a hole in the backing and shredded a section of batting. Fortunately, it didn't break thru to the front.  I stuck another piece of batting in, and patched the backing.  Once it was quilted over, it wasn't that noticeable.