Yesterday I finally had my appointment with the long arm quilter who is going to be doing a couple of my lap quilts–one is the tessellating leaves quilt that was pictured on my last post; the other is this block-of-the-month quilt:
The quilt is done in Kansas Troubles’ Garden Inspirations fabrics. It’s a project that I did with my mom a couple of years ago. I was good about keeping up with the blocks and I managed to piece the top up to the tan inner border, but when faced with doing machine appliqué for the first time, I put the quilt aside and there it sat. For two years. But last week I finally sat down and faced the appliqué…
If you don’t look too closely it actually came out pretty good. And the bottom line is that the top is now finished and hopefully being quilted as we speak!!
During the drive home from the long arm quilters’ house I started to get fired up to finish more of my unquilted quilts (4 being quilted, 7 to go); and I was thinking that I might try a bit of machine quilting of my own. I knew just the quilt I wanted to start with…
It’s a simple pattern but to give it something special I made it out of fine-wale corduroy. Yes, corduroy. I thought it was an inspired choice, but unfortunately the magazine I submitted it to didn’t agree. Sigh. Anyway, in person this quilt looks velvety soft and I’ve been thinking that machine quilting in the ditch might get the job done without detracting from the impact of the fabric.
So when I arrived home yesterday I got busy. I cut a back and batting for the quilt, taped them down to my table, and smoothed the runner over the top to begin pin-basting. I was humming along, happy to be making progress and already thinking of other quilts that I might be able to machine quilt. And then, horror of horrors, I noticed that one of the star centers looked a bit different. “No,” I thought, “that can’t be.” But sure enough, it was. The center was wrong side up and because it’s corduroy you can’t miss it. To fix it I would have to take off the border and the sashing and the star points. And just like that the bubble burst.
For a couple of minutes I actually thought about leaving the center and moving on with the quilting. After all, I’ve heard the myth of Amish quilters intentionally adding a mistake to their quilts for the sake of humility. But alas I’m not Amish and my quilts are already far from perfect, so I picked up the seam ripper and removed the center.
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| so sad… |
Now I have to decide if I’m going to rip the quilt apart to repair the center or if I can try to fix it with some hand-stitching. But first I’ve got to decide if I’m going to push on, fix the mistake, and try to regain my motivation; or if I’m going to admit defeat, pack the quilt away, and move on with another project. Hmmm… seems like the perfect time to write a blog post!