WIP: A Field Guide - Starting again

Yes, I started again...took all the quilting out

While I liked the pattern and texture , I really did not like it for this quilt. In addition, I had not stabilized the quilt at all, using an unfamiliar batting and I could literally feel how the quilt top shifted around while quilting. I started to have these areas of additional puff in odd spots and the seams were puffing out...

Well, took me a while to decide, but in the end I thought it would be a pity to waste the quilt.

I spent 3 days undoing the quilting...this gave me a lot of opportunity to look at my stitches in some detail. Must say, I stitched this design very well...no hovering on the spot with multiple stitches and the stitch length was actually very good. The clean up of the quilt top took another day, picking out all these little leftovers. Then I re-pressed the quilt and re-basted the whole lot. Given that this is good quality Moda fabric, the stitching lines are not overly visible and the whole thing came out looking good as new.

Unfortunately most of last week I sported a massive head cold, so no progress was made on anything, however I started to stabilize the quilt with my new Wonderfil Invisafil thread in a taupe colour in the last few days. This thread is really nice and will be my choice of thread from now on when I usually would have used Monofilament thread. Never quite liked the Monofilament thread, mainly because it has a shine to it and looks somewhat plastic like and is just so fiddly to sew with. The Invisafil blends in like a dream and is much easier to work with. Highly recommended.

Well, this is how far I got

Nice and flat

One row done

I am following Cindy Needham's advice, stitching down every stinking seam (ESS)...not one of my favourite things to do, but this one really needs it. Recently, Cindy Needham had addressed this issue on her blog which I was reading with interest because I usually skip that step because I am a naturally impatient quilter. I think from now on, I will study my basted quilt tops in a bit more detail and think about this beforehand...on some quilts with a nice sticky cotton batting you probably get away with just doing the overall design if you aim for a medium scale, however on others, like the one above with the wool batting, this just did not work. Lesson learnt.

Once this is done, I will do some FMQ on it. Very curious how all this will work out.

Karin