Sew - Stop - Reverse - Repeat

Story of two days

The plan -- no, the commitment -- was to finish this baby quilt to enter in the youth group auction Sunday.

Baby Blocks - design by Marci Baker

Simple straight-line ditch stitching was the plan.  The problem with stitch-in-the-ditch (SITD) is it's butt-ugly when you miss the ditch.

Reverse sew and go to Plan B -- quarter-inch away from the ditch. However, my Pfaff with integrated dual feed doesn't have a very large throat and I was wearing myself out (not to mention the quilt) wrangling the direction changes every 12 or so stitches.

But wait! I have a BabyLock with a larger throat! First, I had to remember how to thread it. Then I discovered it has a walking foot!

Oh, Salvation, I thought (even though I had never used one). I finished stitching all the tumbling blocks with the walking foot, then noticed the back.

Baby Blocks Back

Hmmm, I could maybe live with that so I proceeded to start on the borders.  Unfortunately all the shrinkage in the center was exaggerated in the expanding borders and no way was I going to put my name on that product.

It just got worse and worse

On to Plan C - a different baby quilt. Once again I attempted SITD -- NOT! Reverse and begin again.  This time I thought I'd go down the center of the 4-patch columns, pinning and re-smoothing one column at a time. 

After two columns I could see there was still a lot of "creep" between the top and the back. Reverse and begin again. I changed presser foot pressure. I changed bobbin tension.  (What I didn't think of till much later was adjusting the feed dog height, not sure that it would have made a difference ...)

I finally said "to heck with the walking foot!" It couldn't be much worse with a normal foot. And I was right! Though I really didn't like the stitching down the center of the 4-patch columns because I had chosen to use a variegated thread and the dark stretches just looked like dirty thread.

The quilt at this point was at least stabilized by the vertical stitching so I decided to attempt diagonal stitching -- some in the ditch and some across open spaces.  Not too bad. I removed the vertical stitching.

After washing

Bound, washed, and it was ready with 4 hours to spare!

Yellow Baby Quilt

Happy to report it went for $125!

What I've learned from this experience:

• Don't wait till the last minute just because you don't enjoy the task ahead of you
• Don't use a new device or technique on a last-minute project
• Don't use variegated thread on straight stitching, whether in the ditch or across the surface
• It's finally time to learn how to use the Grace frame that has occupied my bridge for the last five years.

With that done, now maybe I can put some time in on my One Monthly Goal and dig through my purple scraps for RSC.