One Productive Weekend

Saturday night at 12am on the dot, I put the last quilting stitch into the disappearing nine patches.


12 hours later (with some sleep in between), the border was quilted as well. Miracles happened while quilting the border with a straight in the ditch line on both sides of the narrow, purple border, and bee-lines on the broad border. The miracles being that I swear I never passed more than 3 corners before reaching the start of my quilting round. It was amazing, I just sailed through it. Here's me cutting the last quilting thread!


Or so I thought. Because somewhere along that smooth sailing, I hit an iceberg without noticing, it seams.


How could this have happened again????? I even trimmed the border off before quilting it, as I had pledged to do when I quilted the stacked coins baby quilt. I was so exasperated when I found this corner, of course AFTER I had switched out the pink thread and bobbin to light grey and taken my machine apart to put the feed dogs back in and switched the darning foot to the walking foot. Big *sigh*.

And of course, it was the last corner I quilted that this mishap happened on, the one where I had felt so elated that everything went so smoothly and quickly. I'd like to get my hands on that Murphy and his stupid law - it's not like I was that smug to deserve such pains :) Slight drama-queen here.

So I ripped the stitches back out, as I couldn't just cut away the material in this case as I did before with the baby quilt, because the material quilted in was of course part of my border backing.


I tried re-quilting by just switching the thread back to pink and leaving the walking foot on, but it looked stupid and was a pain in the butt, because of course you have to lift the foot and turn the quilt after every stitch in order to make a loop. So I tore that back out too, stopped being lazy, put the darning foot back (but just set the stitch length to '0' and didn't bother to take the feed dogs back out - I really wish for a button to lower them...) and re-did all the loops.

Then I had to trim the border, because as I had expected, the backing was juuuust too small. The selvage would have shown on one side. So I trimmed it ~1/2 inch all around, no biggie, at least I had foreseen this and wisely quilted to only within 3/4" of the edge, so I didn't have to cut through too many quilting seams while trimming. I was also really careful when I handled the trimmed quilt until I had the binding machine-sewn to the top of the quilt, so that none of those quilting seams would open. What a nightmare that would have been.


Here's a trick I figured out for storing binding: I iron my binding strip in half and roll it onto a used toilet paper roll. When I'm ready for sewing the binding to the quilt, I don't bother pinning it all around - I've tried that and found that the binding shifts. Instead, I just start sewing and let the binding roll do its thing on the ground. The twirling didn't get annoying until the last side of the quilt, and even then, it wasn't really a problem.


I was surprised this week about the strange drive I had to get this quilt finished. It's just under 6 months in the making now, even though the top was cut in a week or so, pieced together in another few week, and quilted in about 4 days, so I guess I could have finished it in less than a month ;)

But hey, the result is the same, and you should be able to see a photo of the finished quilt this week!!! I'm so excited!

Best of all, I may have mentioned that I'm making this quilt for a friend who wished for a reddish-pink quilt. Well, she's been really busy this year and we were hardly in touch at all (she lives in Germany). She knows about my quilting and has seen some photos of my recent work and just sent me an email yesterday saying she really really loves my quilt and couldn't she have one and she'd pay me for time and materials etc. Silly girl :) I wrote her back saying she should start getting excited and what she thinks I've been working on since January (we had talked about me making her a quilt before christmas, I guess she didn't believe that I was serious...).

Long post, phew!