Kite Baby Quilt

I had originally intended for my new wave quilt to go to a good friend/co-worker who is expecting her first child in March.  When she announced that she was having a baby girl I decided to make a different quilt that involved more 'girly' colors than the wave quilt that seems more gender neutral/boy-ish to my eyes.  I saw this tutorial on the Modern Quilt Guild blog and thought it seemed perfect.

I guess the only thing that really makes this quilt 'girly' is that it has coral-y reds.  I'm not sure I'll ever make a quilt like this again because I found it really tedious.  There was a lot of squaring (or rectangling) up to do and I never felt like any of my diamonds had all of their points match in the end.  Also some of the points were lopped off when I joined together the rows.  I'm still not sure why this was the case since the blocks were perfect half rectangle triangles after I squared them up.

But my biggest mistake didn't come until after I had sewn the binding on.  I saw a tutorial on machine stitching the binding on and decided to try it.  Usually I hand sew the binding onto the back, but I'm always in the mood for a short cut so decided to give machine binding a whirl.  I think it would have turned out perfectly well, except I had already stitched the binding onto the front 3/8" from the edge and the tutorial recommended that the binding be attached a quarter from the edge.  Not a big deal, I thought, and grabbed my rotary cutter and ruler and quickly trimmed everything up to a quarter of an inch.  Then I went to pin the binding to the back and discovered that when I trimmed up the binding, I also sliced through the bias tape so that it was no longer continuous.  I went ahead and stitched the binding on anyways and it turned out pretty well apart from the corners.  After that I went back and hand stitched the corners on so that the raw edges weren't visible.

Situations like these always make me wonder how noticeable the flaws are to people who don't quilt.