Rhonda Dort

In the last blog post I talked about how 18 minutes of free motion quilting turned into 9 hours of “un-quilting”…

I loaded the quilt sandwich using two layers of batting, Hobbs white 80/20 with Hobbs Tuscany Poly-Down on top. I also purposely chose a light ivory thread for the needle and bobbin. I’ll update this info with thread manufacturer color and weight when I return home in a few days.

If you’ve followed me for very long you know I think quilted feathers are the solution to just about every quilt top loaded on my longarm. This quilt top was no exception. That is…until I was about 18 minutes in.

All of my basic Stitch-in-the-Ditch work was finished first.

I began quilting feathers in the top right block. Right away I knew I wasn’t thrilled with the look.

I felt that the quilting competed with the pieced and appliquéd block

I’m thinking to myself: I really don’t like this…but maybe I will like it with a bit more quilted…

Nope, I’m still not liking it.

Talk about distracting! I hate the quilting. Hate it! Hate it enough that my next step was to unload the quilt, hunt up a sharp seam ripper, find a good Acorn tv series to watch (but mostly listen to) and set about un-quilting.

I figured I had 3, maybe 3.5 hours to get the task done…but no! 9 hours! I quilt Bump Back feathers. Bump Backs have lots and lots of stitching over top previous stitching.

Thank heavens I had my stitch regulator set to 12 instead of 14 stitches per inch!

And just let me add…see this lace? The lace was the reason I had to remove the quilt from the longarm. It was too risky to pick out the quilting stitches from the front side of the quilt. It was so easy to damage the lace by accident no matter how careful I was trying to be. ☹️

My solution: a very basic no frills diagonal cross-hatch with stitching lines 1” apart. I am marking my lines with a Leonis air and water erasable purple ink pen.

Maybe I was in a bad frame of mind at this point but when I started round 2 of quilting I really was underwhelmed with the straight lines.

After I had 2 blocks quilted I liked the quilting a bit better.

Remember way back a few blog posts ago when I added the wonky strips to each side of the wonky vintage blocks? Then I added the lace to visually distract from the wonky-ness of it all? In the block above the seams for the added side strips are very visible but unless you know what to look for they do not distract! Yay!

Slowly (and I do mean slowly!) the quilting is starting to look ok.

Slowly…never in a million years did I think that straight line ruler work would take so long! I timed a few blocks and just the ruler work takes 30-35 minutes per block!

So what’s that acrylic yard stitch doing? Unless you want to get vertigo looking at the finished quilt, the lines from block to block need to line up.

So this is where I am currently. My longarming has come to a sudden stand-still, all caused by the appearance of grandson #2! Can you think of a better reason to put quilting on the back burner? ❤️🙂❤️

Blessings to all and happy quilting, Rhonda