Presenting... Gideon!

Ta daaah!

After nearly a month of work, blood, sweat, and tears, Gideon is complete!

Slightly different angle.

What have I learned throughout this project? Well for starters, I'm never using regular spray paint for a restoration again.

This occurred about 5 seconds after I put him all back together.

But honestly, after my initial despair and hair pulling I realized I'm actually happy that there was some damage. It was unsettling in the strangest way for him to look so perfect; it felt like I'd removed all his character and history. Which I did in a way, but now I'm giving him the chance to tell yet another story as he spends some time in my company.

Sometime in the future I will repeat this whole process. Well, I won't--I'll take him to an auto-body shop and ask them to do all the painting with auto paint. For now however I have a beautimous machine that sews like an absolute dream after almost a month of being in pieces.

To celebrate, I quilted one of the placemats!

Binding will follow once I've got everything quilted.

I had the thread break a couple times during the sewing process but I think that was just due to a poorly wound bobbin. The second bobbin wound much more smoothly and the quilting went well as well.

So easy!

I also discovered yet another benefit to those mini-bolts I bought. Since a standard yardage of fabric is wider from selvage to selvage than two of these placemats, to cut efficiently was a piece of cake! I just laid one placemat on the twice-folded fabric and cut!

Poifect.

A little trimming later and I had the backing fabric with a minimum of waste. Of course, I'm going to chop up the scraps for a string quilt or something--Bonnie's suggestions and ideas are just too much fun!

That's all from me for now; I've got a bit of a cold I'm still fighting, but of course my body decided it was time to get up at 6:30 AM. -_- I'm off to have breakfast and look longingly at Gideon and the unquilted placemats until Glenn wakes up. He's definitely no early bird like me!