Welcome to the boards and please accept a big round of applause. That's a fantastic first quilt!
I'm a big believer in my quilts being crafts or useful objects and not art, so as I say they are designed to be "machine pieced, machine quilted, and machine washed!". I always wash them before I give them away, to take off any thing (like pet hair) they may have collected during the process. In 40 years of quilting I've only had one disaster, and that was with a really bad piece of maroon fabric. Otherwise all quilts have survived their first of many washings and none have fallen apart or shredded.
If you have a laundromat you like available with a large machine, it can be worth it for that first wash for a larger top. Otherwise, I just stuff them in my extra-large capacity home unit If you have a stackable size machine, I'd probably definitely go the laundromat option. We had a great one in our neighborhood for a long time, sadly the original owner has officially retired (the laundromat was his after 20 years in the army first retirement) and it has gone downhill a bit. But it was sort of nice sometimes when I was behind on laundry and doing 5-6 loads all at once in an hour instead of it taking all day.