Machine Quilting Again

I've begun machine quilting again, and Baby Groot is running much quieter after his tune-up. I tried to continue on the quilt that I stopped quilting in March, but after about 4 1/2 hours, I ran out of thread! I didn't have any thread that was a good match, so I put that one away unfinished (again!). Rather than stop quilting, I switched to another project and have finished quilting two other quilts in the time it took for a new thread cone to arrive (about a week).

In the midst of all this work on unfinished projects I have been contemplating why I don't finish some projects. I finish a lot of quilts, but over a couple of decades, the unfinished ones can add up. Here is the breakdown:

1) I wasn't sure how I want to quilt it. So rather than going through books and Pinterest until I could settle on a quilting design, I folded it up and moved on to a different project.

2) I had a technical problem that I didn't feel like fixing just then. Triangles that got distorted and lost their points, pieced borders that don't fit, plain borders that ripple, a machine quilting pattern that I decided I didn't like, etc. It wasn't that I don't know how to fix it--at this point I know how to fix most quilty problems--I just didn't want to fix it.

3) I didn't like the way the design was working. Design issues can be difficult to troubleshoot, and even if you know what is wrong you have to weigh the effort of the solution. An example is a set of Dresden plate blocks that I made with a light gray solid background (all those modern quilters with their stylish grays influenced me). I put them up on the design wall with some other Dresden plate blocks that I'd intended to mix them with. And I didn't like the way they mixed. The gray made the blocks positively dreary. So I pulled out all the gray ones. I made a nice quilt with the other blocks, and now I am left with 19 (why such a weird number, I do not recall) dull Dresdens. I hand appliqued these blocks. I do not want to rip them off their backgrounds. I want to find a way to make them work with the gray.

So here are some (sightly out of focus) experiments at my sit and stitch group of how to salvage the Dresdens:



So far I am leaning towards adding black sashing. Maybe.