Oliver's Birthday Quilt Part 7

We're at the final stage of assembling the top for Oliver's birthday quilt. I've sorted and rearranged all the patchwork blocks, and stacked them in sewing order. Now I'll put them together in seven rows of five blocks each:

Two tricks I use when sewing blocks into rows: I always mark the first block's left-hand corner with a safety pin, so I know where the row starts. I also add a post-it to each pile showing the row number and sewing direction so I don't sew them out of order.

Here's the first row of blocks sewn together:

And all seven rows sewn together:

I then sew the rows together to finish the quilt top. Here's how it turned out:

To give you a better idea of the size, here it is on the sofa in my office:

The top took about 35 hours of cutting, pressing and sewing to put together, and this is a very easy pattern that I've made many times. Once I've batted, backed and pinned it I'll hand quilt it, which will take another 40 to 50 hours. It's truly a labor of love, and also why I never sell my quilts. Paying myself minimum wage for labor plus the cost of the materials would mean I'd have to charge $700.00 for it just to break even. :)