UFO from last December completed

I began making my very first quilt on December 6, 2015 here.  I ran into Amy Gibson's blog at Stitchery, Dickery, Dock where she explains how to make a Disappearing Nine-Patch quilt here.  

Yesterday afternoon after 2 days of not sewing anything, I pulled this quilt top and the fabrics for the quilt back out of the Committed Quilts bag and started cutting.  It's a simple quilt back.  I had decided to take one fabric and run it lengthwise down the middle and then cut the other into 2 long pieces and sew them to each side like this:

That was perfect until I realized that the quilt top was 96 inches, giving me no leeway for the quilter so I added a 10-inch strip in the center like this:

Don't you love my high technology?  This is my large kitchen white board that started in my husband's office, then used exhaustively for homeschooling, and now keeps track of grocery and to-do lists as well as ideas for quilt design.

I figured that it would look funny to add more material matching the strips because the print on the blue is large scale, making the error obvious anyway  so I reversed the fabric.

Here's what it looks like finished:

Here's a close-up picture of the blue fabric:

The long-finished quilt top:

That's the quilt folded in half.  The final quilt has 6 blocks down and 5 blocks across with sashing in between each.  As you can tell, I rotated the disappearing nine-patch blocks differently than Amy Gibson did.  

This entire quilt has been made from my stash as planned.  It hasn't exhausted my Christmas fabric stash, but the stash is greatly diminished.  I'll have to pick the binding out of it next so that will use even more of it.

Now the quilt waits to be quilted.  The final quilt size will be about 80"x96"--rather heavy to maneuver on my sewing machine.  I still have no idea how to quilt it either.  

I think I've come pretty far on this quilting journey and feeling happy about my progress.  How about you?  Have you already been quilting awhile or just starting out?  For the record, I'm pretty sure I'm still about a Beginner's level.  How do you measure your advancement?