Learning Things the Hard Way

I should be quilting.  Or, more exactly, UN-quilting.  But I get so dang frustrated that sometimes I just have to say, "Scr*w this for a while," and go do something else.

The quilt I mentioned in the previous blog is about 90% finished.  A tip from a mailing list convinced me to first quilt all the way across the top border, then quilt the area between the side borders (leaving the side borders free), then quilt all the way across the bottom border.  I then unloaded the quilt from the frame and re-loaded it sideways, the point being to enable me to quilt the side borders in one long stretch, rather than in short bursts, as I would have done.

I have been dreading this point for weeks.  First, I was almost dreading unrolling the quilt and seeing the whole project in all (or 90% of) it's glory.  Up to now, I'd only seen 9"-wide stretches of the quilt.  I knew that I'd encountered multiple little problems along the way, and I hadn't always been happy with the way I'd fixed them.  Would the sum total of all these little messes make the whole thing look shabby?  Secondly,
this is my first "real" quilt with this machine; turning this quilt in the frame during the quilting process is a step I had not practiced. 

Note to self:  don't try a new technique on something important, as there will always be unanticipated kinks.

I unloaded the quilt a couple of days ago.  Before re-loading it, I spread it out on a bed to examine it.  Thankfully, though it is far from perfect, the overall effect was not as bad as I had feared.)  Deeming it worthy of finishing, I re-loaded it into the frame.  It took several tries to get it right.  I had trouble getting the borders to lie flat and straight.  I had trouble transferring my quilting design to the fabric.  Then, when I finally began to quilt, I had trouble with extra fullness in the border.

Now, a professional quilter would be wondering why I'm having so much trouble getting these side borders to lie flat, and might suspect that my borders weren't straight and flat to begin with, but that person would be wrong; I was meticulous in my measuring, cutting, and sewing; this sucker was straight and square, once upon a time.  A professional quilter might also wonder why I didn't transfer the quilting design to the fabric before I put the quilt back in the frame.  That person might be correct in suspecting that, in some things, I am just plain dumb.  In any case, after quilting the first row across the first side border, I found that there was a big mess of puckers under the quilt, where I hadn't been paying such close attention.  I'm going to have to take that row out. 

But not right now.