finished quilt :: "sugar skull-eating-pirates"

I finally finished the crazy wacky baby quilt that I blogged about earlier.  Again, this was a quilt made for a young lady who is my substitute teacher extraordinaire, and even returned to sub in my middle school classroom only 5 weeks after giving birth to her second child ... wow!  That's impressive, in my book.  The whole "pirates eating calaveras" theme came from the fact that we are the pirates at my school, and that she is a Spanish speaker, and thus who subs in my Spanish classes.  When I first thought of this idea, it seemed like a really good one.  In the end, the quilt is just a little crazy, I admit ... as I said before, she'll either love it ... or hide it.

Here's a close-up of my quilting, which was a pseudo-loopy stitch ("pseudo" meaning that it didn't always turn out quite like I wanted it to).  Given my general inexperience at free motion quilting, I'm really okay with how it turned out:

The backing of the quilt is the allover pirate fabric, with one extra strip of red + scraps, because I needed the extra width.

And for the "signing" of the quilt, I decided to do a tag like one that I saw on someone's blog (and immediately pinned).  For this tag, I first embroidered two things, one on each side of a fold ...

... which turned into a tag:

... and then I inserted the tag into the binding. 

The back has my name and year on it.  (My embroidery skills leave a bit to be desired ... more on that later.)  I have no idea what this will hold up as, in terms of tags and baby hands grabbing at it, but I thought it might be a nice idea to at least try out.  We'll see !

Yay for a finished baby quilt!