The delightful Emma Mary

The spring in my bobbin was the culprit for the dodgy stitches that I had to unpick and of course new springs which are a few dollars in the US are unavailable to purchase here in Australia and if I buy them from the US they cost a fortune.  I determined that my spring just needed a bit of a stern talking to and that with some heavy prodding with a needle seemed to do the trick.

Gail had tacked down all of the hexies in the centre panel which was very scary to quilt.  The quilting foot likes a nice flat surface.  It will find every loose edge and either bend it over or it'll go underneath the appliqué and if you're lucky it'll rip the whole thing off.  If you're not lucky it'll get stuck in the same place and either tear your quilt top or there'll be so many tight stitches you'll tear a hole in the area trying to release the foot from the quilt.  Fun!

So I started out with this Hera marking tool making sure to hold the edges of the hexies flat while the machine quilted over them.  That worked on that quilting line because there wasn't too much quilting going over the hexies at that point.

I then had a brain wave and I tore up pieces of thin paper and quickly threw them under the machine whenever it reached a hexy.  This was nerve wracking because the machine was moving so quickly in different directions and I was terrified I'd miss a spot and things would go badly wrong.  I decided to stick with the paper idea but I covered the whole centre panel with a sheet of paper.  This worked but I then had so much paper to remove afterwards!

Removing the paper reminded me of removing wallpaper in my youth.  You'd grab a piece and a huge amount would come off in one pull and you'd think this is easy I'll get the job done in no time.  And then you'd grab a bit more and it would be stubbornly stuck to the wall and would take three hours and come off in a billion teeny tiny pieces!

Anyway, I finished quilting woo hoo and I watched a bit of telly while I unpicked my basting lines and removed any paper I'd missed.  I baste my lines to keep the quilt straight with a large stitch which is easy to unpick.  My last line however, was basted with a tiny stitch and I didn't notice until I'd stitched across the whole 80 inches of quilt ha ha!  That one took a whole episode of Selling Houses Australia to unpick!

Here is the back.  It's untrimmed so it'll be a good 4 inches smaller all round.

The front.

That pesky centre panel.

  

Thread

Have you ever wondered how much thread a long arm machine uses to quilt?  Well this is how much thread it used quilting one row.  That's 20,527 stitches.  Or rather, that WAS 20,527 stitches.

SIGH

But on a positive note, I am getting really good at unpicking!  Woo!  Now to work out why my machine messed up...

Piecing a backing

I'm going to be quilting Gail's Emma F#&*ing Mary quilt.  First though it needed a backing.  While I was at retreat we laid the fabrics on top of each other and I thought the backing would be big enough but it turned out to be the same size as the quilt which is not ideal when you need it to be 4 inches bigger than the quilt on all sides for the quilting frame.  I knew I'd be piecing the backing but I didn't want it to have too many seams.  By the time I finished with it it had a billion seams.  I'm not quite sure what happened there!

The fabrics I had to use as the backing were "designer" labels and not cheap.  They're designed for quilters.  So why are they so difficult to work with?!  The green ladies in a frame didn't have a single frame in line with another frame.  In order for it to be nicely trimmed for use you either cut some of the ladies heads off or it was just wonky.  This kind of thing really annoys me.  Do your job well quilt fabric designers!

There that told them!  And I'm sure there are many of them reading this blog post right now ha ha!

I kind of decided to do an improv type backing.  I cut out the green ladies into fairly useable pieces and put them up on my wall.  I wanted it to look fairly off centre to disguise my lack of quilting experience.  After I put it up on the wall I decided that was good enough and started cutting out the pink fabric to go around the green.

Oh and what a surprise!  If you want straight lines going down the quilt you get wonky ones going across the top and vice versa.  Quilting fabric designers!!!  Quilters generally cut straight lines!  Unless you cut while you're a few glasses of wine down at retreat that is.  Then all bets are off.

I decided wonky lines going across the quilt would be less noticeable so that's what I did.

I had to stop then for a Turtle emergency!  This much loved cuddly toy had a nasty accident but I managed to fix her.  I didn't take pics of the finish because I didn't know the people asking for help and thought they might think I'm weirder than I am but the young lady was very happy with the result.

Back to the backing and I started by cutting the pink the length I wanted and I divided it into two unequal parts.  I kept the selvages on as I was hoping they'd give the back some stability.

A fair bit of sewing later and this is the result.  It's not great but it's quite nice when you look at it with your own eyes.  

Now I have to prep the quilt top and get it quilted!

No rush ;-)