Lessons Learned The Hard Way

Although I frequently check the back of my quilt when quilting, this time I got caught up in quilting. I was in the “zone.” I finished quilting this section and then looked at the back. Imagine my dismay.

What do you do? You grit your teeth and handle it. So often we are shown beautiful finished quilts as if nothing goes wrong. I’m here to say sometimes things go wrong. Maybe not on scale of a mess that I do but, stuff happens.

It took me an hour of carefully ripping out the quilting and another 45 minutes to pick out thread with bent tweezer and cleaning up lose threads with the Cotton Picker.

I thank Roy for making me the beautiful seam ripper out of Olive tree wood. It is used more often than I care to think. The special scissors allow you to cut threads close to fabric without cutting fabric. They were a gift from my husband thanks to Sally for helping him pick them out. Finally the bent tweezer are a fabulous tool for pulling out broken threads.

After the tedious job of ripping and cleaning up my mistake I redid spray adhesive on the loose backing and secured the edge of the quilt all the way around by pinning. Linda shared with me the fact that pins should be a fist width part not a wide opened hand width apart.

I have successfully done several large quilts using only spray adhesive. I admit the idea for pinning the edge of quilt did not occur to me and my readings to date had not turned up this nugget of information. But, the quilt was unharmed and the lesson learned.

For those who are curious, above is the front of the quilt I am working on (and that remains unscathed by my learning curve.). I’m back to happy quilting.