Bah

I say seam ripper, Tom says whatever.



I decided to leave the quilt as-is, got a little creative with getting enough fabric together for the backing and assembled the quilt sandwich last night after work.

I should have stopped there.

But I didn't.

I was all gung-ho about charging through this thing. To my credit, I did take the time to make a tiny sample quilt and test out the aesthetics of my proposed straight-line quilting approach. Yesterday I lamented my lack of free-motion skills, but I honestly thought the straight lines would look good here.

They looked good on the little sample. Really.

So I jumped in. And it looked OK. And then bad. And then awful. I figured that was just because it was late and I was tired. This normally happens (I think something stinks, go to bed and wake up in love with it all over).

Not this morning.

So I made the call. "Screw it," I declared to the dogs. We're going to start over.

I've never ripped quilting out of a quilt before. It sucks. It's slow.

But I am VERY glad I did.

Here's where we're at now.



These are the lines. They look awfuler in person.



I made the switch for several reasons.

1) I feel like the lines forced you to follow the motion of the quilt, instead of just letting it exist. I think this quilt top has enough motion all by itself and needs a quilting pattern that is evenly distributed. That makes sense, right?

2) There is so much piecing, and I wanted to quilt over as much of it as possible for a solid construction.

3) The strip piecing is wonky, and the lines, which I tried to keep as straight as possible, looked horribly off.

4) It looked wrinkly, and like it would not wrinkle in a nice way when washed.

I tore out one line of quilting this morning, and it look about 15 minutes. So, uh, tonight's going to be long.

First, I'm going to fix myself a gin and tonic. Then I'm going to finish zigzagging the half I started this morning.

Then it's seam ripping until my eyes cross.