Monday, June 20, 2016

PLAN B

Well, as you might know, sometimes when you try something, it doesn't always work! In this case, I quilted the bottom of my quilt, Mt. Rainier, reflecting in Tipsoo Lake with a variegated thread. While I was quilting it, it looked fine. When I hung it on my working wall, it looked like KA KA. The darker portions of the thread stood out and didn't look pretty. So, I said to myself, "Well, I guess you'll just have to pull out all the quilting threads."

Have you ever "reverse stitched" quilting threads or tried pulling them out. Maybe things would of been fine if I were yanking out quilting threads on a commercial fabric but I was in fact, pulling them out of a fabric I hand-painted. As I pulled them out, my cloth starting looking like it came from another planet and the blues became almost white. So, half-way through the process, I bagged it.

Of course, I hadn't painted enough matching fabric when I initially painted my sky and water fabrics, so what to do?????? Digging through my stash, I found a perfectly lovely hand-painted fabric by Mickey Lawler that  sorta kinda "went"  with the sky fabric. I dug out my wax pastels and did some shading to reflect the sky and voila! it looked pretty darn good.

In order to remove the fabric I previously quilted, I cut away the backing, batting, and hand- painted fabrics. Luckily, I had enough backing fabric leftover, so I hand-stitched it to the back of the quilt, placed another piece of batting inside, followed by the Mickey Lawler fabric. The major issue was the trees and the mountain reflection were then twice as thick so it was kinda sorta touch and go stitching them down to the new fabric and backing and batting. It also required more machine embroidery and a pretty large needle to go through all of the layers. Before stitching those layers down, I slid in three layers of different colored tulle to make the reflections on the water a bit darker than the sky. 

I am now "re-quilting" the bottom portion of the water with a different colored thread! Lesson learned, always test your quilting on a like piece of fabric before going to the actual project!
Here's a photo of the quilt prior to quilting it with the wrong thread. I'll post a new photo once I finish the quilting!

Happy quilting!

Fondly,

Joyce

 

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