Quilt The Living Daylight Out Of It!

 Sometimes the only option is quilting the living daylights out of a quilt. This a the quilt hanging down off the longarm. As can be seen, it is not flat. Nope! Those wedding ring circles would really lay flat over a basketball..................ok instead of running screaming from the room I just continued to sew around the outside of the big circles all that way down the quilt. I pulled and tugged, pinned and patted to get at least that part flat. Ok after TEN hours of that I am finally done! Now to tackle the center of those larger parts.......................they are seriously puffy, well some of them are. The top part of the quilt really was not as bad as this part. So deep breath................I had to modify my lovely plan for quilting this and will file it away for another wedding ring quilt in the future.

 Yep look at those bad boys puff and pucker!

 Close up...................yikes!!!!!! So I decided to start in the very center and do some dense pebbles which if I have to pick out later because it did not work would be really painful. The pebbles helped, ok maybe there is hope. Deep breath and I did the outline of the petals of the flowers............helped a little more. Then I added the lines in the pedals and did outline around the outside. Finally I did the corners with some kind of random swirly lines and actually ended up with a flat design. There were a couple of puckers in this one and that was unavoidable so they will just stay there like they are.

 Here are a row of flowers and they are not bad. So there is hope for this to be really pretty.

 Here is a slick trick: I put cans around the block during quilting and this pulls on the fabric and helps with getting it to ease out some of that puckering. I am now up to 10 of these flowers and they are looking pretty good.

The backstory behind this quilt is that the customer passed away and I kept putting off the quilting. She was 95 when she gave this to me to quilt and she passed away shortly after that. She said this quilt was an experiment and she hoped I would be able to quilt it........she knew it had problems. When I am finished I will contact her family so they can get this back and hopefully have a nice heirloom. I really think once it is all done it will be a very pretty quilt. 

The lady that pieced this made really beautiful cutting edge modern pictorial quilts that I quilted for her. For some in their 90's she was a VERY young spirit!!!!!