Quilt progress

My husband's going to be gone all weekend (I'm starting to feel like I never see him!) so I figured it would be a good time to get some work done on the big quilt. The next step I had to take was getting the backing, batting, and quilt top all sandwiched together.

First I spread everything out on the floor. Wrench decided that this new thing needed to be inspected:

Molly decided it was infested with some kind of invisible under-the-quilt critter, and had to take care of THAT situation:

I had to start over once, when I discovered that my backing didn't match up to my quilt top (there wasn't enough in the corner Molly's looking at in the above photo). I managed to only fling my safety pins all over the place once, and only poked myself a dozen times, so overall, I'd say it's a win. Now it looks like this:

Now the hard part, and the part I've been dreading - actually quilting it! Any advice for a beginner??