Cheryl's Quilt - Finished!

I am so happy to announce that Cheryl's quilt is finally finished (read the story of this quilt HERE). It's only been about a year... Feel like the quilt whisperer...after some agonizing when first confronted with her quilt, which was pretty much ruined, I bit the bullet and undid most of it. This involved

• taking the entire quilt apart - that was a huge job!
• taking all of the borders of and getting rid of one border
• cutting some width of the borders to straighten them
• undoing the center of the quilt top and re-sewing it
• squaring off the quilt top
• re- joining the strips of the inner border
• reinforcing some of the seams in the quilt and re-sewing some seams altogether
• substituting one strip of the outer border with a new piece (luckily Cheryl had some leftover fabric) to get rid of a tear
• blocking the quilt and managing to get 1/4inch in width on top and bottom
• sewing and attaching a new binding.

This is what it looked like before

Sorry, the photo is not that great. The quilt had puckers galore, some tears, the quilting design was just awful and the stitching quite bad...it just looked really bad.

The quilting design that was used

 The end result of the rejuvenation

Texture of the quilting

The finished quilt

Luckily, Cheryl had given me complete artistic license to do what I wanted with it. She did not care much for this quilt...not entirely sure whether this was true as the fabric was just beautiful and of really high quality (except for the white...I think that must have been an add-on as it behaved entirely different when stitching over it). I felt it was a pity...I actually really liked this quilt and the colours she had chosen. However, let me tell you, cutting into this quilt did not feel good at all...I had visions of completely stuffing it up and some anxiety around whether this would turn out at all and the thought that this was not my quilt always hung over me (as I do on occasions make those inexplicable mistakes that render projects UFOs...in the department of "oops that did not work!").

Anyway this turned out really nice. The dense quilting is hiding most of the imperfections as the eye is drawn to the texture rather than the detail. Learned heaps from it and actually was reminded of some fundamentals in quilting. The one thing that Cheryl did very well was the outer border. She cut this on the lengthwise grain which is absolutely correct. When I first started quilting I did that a couple of times as well, however than got a bit more lazy and started cutting it on the crosswise grain. Sewing the binding onto this quilt, Cheryl's outer border was absolutely flat and beautiful to sew and it reminded me to maybe pay a bit more attention to my work and starting to cut the borders on the lengthwise grain again...it made such a difference.

Overall, it turned out pretty straight...I was quite surprised by that as the middle continued to remain a bit bulged out. When I was blocking it I had a variance of about 1/2inch on top and bottom, but managed to stretch it down to about 1/4inch. Also was a good exercise in challenging that perfectionism of mine. When I attached the binding, I had to accept that this would not be entirely straight, so stopped fussing and just attached the binding and I must say, this turned out absolutely beautiful...better than on some of my other quilts where I fussed over the straightness.

Let's just hope that she will like it and more importantly, use it.

Karin