The making of a quilt....in many stages...

So.... I have this idea for making a quilt. I have fallen in love with kaliedescope quilts and am on my third one. The other two were much smaller (one a tablecloth and one a wall hanging) shown below.

The one I'm working on now is for the couch on my screen porch. It is kind of a couch/bed. My idea is to make a quilt that will fit nicely over the seat of the couch and make matching covers for all the loose pillows on the back of the couch. I keep a quilt on it now, but it does not match anything and looks very tacky... as seen in the photo below....
Here are the first hexagons for the new quilt!

Here I have put together the hexagons for the center of the quilt.



I have added the borders, but it is a full size quilt, so I laid it on table and photographed one corner.
I want to quilt everything at one time and have started on the cushions. I have never quilted a large quilt before, so I wanted to quilt the cusions first. Here are some preliminary shots of the cushions.

This is the back of a small cushion. I had a lot of problems with it. Thread breaks, skipped stitches, and just not having a good plan of what I was going to do with the free motion design.

This is the back side of the one above and I think it looks better than the front! However, I am using scraps for the inside of the cushions and red will definitely not be a part of that room!


This is the front side of the small cushion. I finally diagnosed the problems. I was using the wrong size needle and had my machine set up for 'lightweight' fabric. After I changed the needle and settings, the quilting went much better!

This is the front of one of the large cushions. The quilting went fine and I am quite happy with this one. The back of this cushion will be quilted whole cloth in the dark brown fabric that I used for one of the bordersnand I need to come up with an interesting design. I am kind of looking at the backs of these cushions as ways to practice new free motion quilting designs.

That's all I have done at this time and I have to work tomorrow so I don't expect to get much more done until next week. I will keep posting my progress on this project both to share it with you and to help me organize what my plan for finishing it! I already have plans in the works for my next quilt, so I am anxious to finish this one!