my first quilt ever, finished at last

 It was about 9 years ago when I got seriously interested in patchwork & quilting, but I didn't know how to start. By a coincidence a new, one year, evening patchwork & quilting course was just about to start at a local school. So, for next 10 months, one evening a week I was learning all about the quilt, from planning, measuring, choice of fabrics, construction....We could choose how large our quilt was going to be. Most ladies went for a baby size or a lap quilt, possibly a single size one. I went for a full size double! (You can tell I was new to this, no idea!!) We all were learning the same blocks, adjusted to the size of our quilt.
We started stitching by hand, but later could also use a sewing machine.
For a reason I can no longer remember, I decided that my first quilt was going to be all hand stitched!
Needless to say, that when the course was finished, my quilt wasn't. It was all hand pieced and all blocks were hand quilted. The course finished, something new and more exiting came along (don't ask what) and my quilt was forgotten, or rather, it has been pushed from corner to corner since. Just under 2 x 2m, my largest UFO. Until last week.
Now, I don't do new year resolutions, by now I know I can't keep them. I don't make stitching plans, I pick up and put down various stitching as the mood takes me and that works for me. But I realised that if I don't finish this quilt now, I never will. Time to introduce it to the machine. So I quilted in the ditch around the blocks, hand quilted around the hearts on the borders and stitched on the binding. May be at some point in the future I could do more quilting on the borders, but that will do for now.

Yes, I can see quite a few faults and the colours and the fabrics would not be my choice today. But despite that, this is not a bad addition to our guest room.