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.
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