Midnight at the Oasis Quilt Finish

I have to admit that lately I've been starting a lot more quilts than I've been finishing, but I have however finally finished my Midnight at the Oasis quilt a pattern by Jen Kingwell.  I did enjoy this project for the main part.  I foundation pieced the center of the quilt as well as the outer blocks instead of sewing in the traditional method. The applique was my first ever attempt at any sort of applique so it was a learning process for me.  My bias stems were a bit ackward and I used freezer paper to make my shapes instead of doing a needle turn.  This was also a first attempt at making a Medallion quilt as well.  I was fairly pleased that it remained perfectly square and exact until I got to the final border, which required me to do some finessing to get square again.

I think what took me so long to finish this quilt was the fact that it is really not all that big in size.  I seriously struggle making small quilts as I don't see them as being as usable.  My practical nature doesn't want a small quilt for looking at, it wants a large quilt to snuggle underneath, which this size quilt does not offer.  That played a large part in deciding how I would quilt it.  I threw snuggly out the window and decided this would be a wall hanging, which gave me allowance to quilt it to "death", something I usually prefer not to do even though it is fun and looks cool.

I entered it in the local show last week, it won a first in the Applique section after the stewards changed the category from Machine Pieced/Machine Quilted to Applique.  It was the only entry in the category.  Hee hee...