Watch Me Grow Progress Update

I'm getting to the final stages of my Watch Me Grow chart that I started months and months ago.  Last night I basted my quilt sandwich. For the non-quilters out there, this means that I layered my backing, the batting and the top of the quilt, and used special curved safety pins to hold the layers together.  Here's what it looks like post-basting:

I also cut my binding tape. After some research, I decided to make cross-grain/straight-grain tape instead of bias tape.  This means that I cut selvedge to selvedge, instead of on the bias.  Apparently, bias tape is only required if one is going around curves, which I'm not.  The tape took surprisingly little time to prepare.  After cutting five strips, I sewed them together and ironed them in half. 

 I used a toilet paper roll to roll up the binding and felt mighty clever, let me tell you!

Since this is my first quilting project ever, I decided to test out my walking foot on a mini project before quilting my chart.  I made a pot holder.  The quilting went wonderfully, but the binding did not work out well so tonight I'm going to rip it out and redo it.  Hopefully I will be ready to start quilting my Grow Chart tomorrow.

Happy Sewing!