Having lost steam, after completing this quilt top a couple of week ago, I have finally finished the project....and much to my surprise, the recipient is still a baby--so it still fits! (Patting myself on back). At any rate, the weekend before last I was kind of tied up on other projects, but I did manage to get in a little quality sewing time on 'National Quilt Day', this past Saturday. And, fortunately for me, I had stopped at the quilt shop before I started sewing this and realized that this quilt would be much more practical if I removed the batting (which meant taking out a hundred safety pins to do so and putting them back afterwards).
Put an art quilt DVD in the player, slipped on the old machine quilting gloves and was off to a lively start with a little free-motion here, some spirals there, and then it all came crashing down. I wanted to do flowers on another block throughout, so I found an appropriate marking pen, drew them out, but when I went to sew them, I would keep skipping stitches...not just one, but a bunch, so I'd have an inch of nice even little stitches and then there'd be a stitch that was an inch long. I ripped out, I rethreaded, I rebobbined, I poured a glass of wine, took a few cleansing breaths, turned the machine off and then on, shook the tension out of my shoulders and continued to do this, rip it out, do it, rip it out.
About to give up (after all, I did stitch in the ditch down the rows), I realized that without batting inside this, there was no reason that I couldn't just cheat and use 'conventional' sewing (feed dogs up, presser foot down, sew in one direction) to 'quilt' the flowers. They didn't turn out too bad. So I made some simple x's on some of the other blocks, and I was done with it.
Now I just have to figure out what went wrong before I start on the next one.
