Really?!?

So, can you see it?


There is one rotated half-square triangle unit in this quilt. I sewed the blocks, pressed them, and squared them up. Didn't notice it. I arranged them on my design wall and stared at them off and on for at least a week while I auditioned several different colors of sashing and worked out the border design. Didn't notice it. I sewed it together, pressed the entire top, spread it out on the floor and crawled all over it, basting it with safety pins, and then took a photo of the quilt. Didn't notice it. I spent several hours machine quilting the quilt. Didn't notice it. I spread it out on the floor again and buried the quilting thread tails and carefully pinned the binding to the front of the quilt. Didn't notice it. Not until I hand-sewed a quarter of the binding to the back of the quilt and spread it out on the floor again to check that I wasn't getting any border wave did I see the one rotated half-square triangle unit.

I am not fixing it.



Tumbler quilt wavy borders fixed

To fix the wavy borders, I added three more rows of quilting to the borders of Tumbler quilt. The extra quilting drew in the edges of the quilt.


Next I ripped the binding off. I spritzed the borders with water and pressed them, and then pinned the binding back on the quilt. When I re-sewed the binding to the quilt, I cut about 2.5 inches off the binding. That's how much the extra quilting shrank the perimeter of the quilt.


I finished the binding by hand. No more wavy borders. Next time I will be more careful with how the quilting density is distributed across the quilt.


Now that the Tumbler quilt is fixed, I have been working on machine quilting the Charlie Harper quilt (the colors were inspired by a Charlie Harper print). The pattern is 'Tumalo Trail' by Bonnie Hunter. Two biologists saw me practicing the quilting design on the whiteboard outside of my office at lunch one day and they both said 'algae'. I ran out of thread before I finished the quilting on this one and had to order more. It took 6 hours and 40 minutes to machine quilt it.

I also finished sewing the quilt top for the quilt on the design wall behind the sewing machine in this photo, but I ran out of cotton batting so I put it away for now.