Sometimes the excitement of finishing a project gets the better of me and I do something careless in my haste to finish. Well, that happened with the Scrap Dance Mystery Quilt. How is it that I can look at a quilt for weeks on end, do this mistake early on and miss every possible time to catch it? The mistake was made in the original unit construction, yet I didn’t see it then. Nor did I catch it when I assembled the blocks. Or when I put the blocks together. Or when I added the bloody borders! Or when I loaded it to be quilted, and then quilted it. Didn’t see it when I added the binding either. I only noticed it when the whole, entire quilt was finished. My stomach sank.
I thought, well, I’ll just take clever pictures, no one will see it. But I saw it. Every time I looked at the quilt the stupidity of my haste glared back at me. So, it had to be fixed. Here is how I did that. First, here is the mistake. Did you find it in the last post? Bottom right, the the dark green patch and the white background patch are switched. The green should be to the outside.
I began with placing a piece of Golden Threads paper over the top to trace the quilting that was done.
I traced over the quilting I had already done, going out to the surrounding patches for lining up later. Then I carefully began to unstitch the two patches that needed to be switched, taking up only enough of the quilting to get the patches up.
Next, switch the patch positions, and carefully pin and hand stitch back into the proper place.
Load the quilt back on the frame and lay the quilting diagram over the patches, matching up with the registration marks on the adjoining patches so it lines up correctly. I can’t use the original needle marks, because they are no longer in the right places as the patches are upside down now. So I tried to scratch them out with a brush and a fingernail. I put the tracing paper back on the patches.
Quilt the section again through the Golden Threads tracing paper. Try to do the start and stop in the edges of the quilting that is in the adjoining patches.
Pull off the tracing paper, getting all the little bits with tweezers.
This part will take forever. I thought about using wash away solvy, but I haven’t washed the quilt yet, and I didn’t want to mess up the flatness of the quilt with water before showing it.
Here it is done, you can see the hand stitches if you look closely. Right now, finished is better than perfect! The best lesson this quilt taught me was to slow down, not get in such a hurry (difficult when I am excited about a project), and inspect the quilt flimsy carefully before moving on to quilting. From now on, I am going to take pictures of the tops more carefully to be sure there are no mistakes. Lesson learned!
In a future post, I’ll show you an even bigger mess that I fixed. Hope you learned from my boo-boo!!
Sharing