The tortoise and the seam ripper.

The tortoise and the hare is a classic story that portrays the message that slow and steady wins the race. This was a hard lesson learned today as I tried to speed through some free motion quilting. That was when I realized my quilt was folded under itself while I was quilting. I ripped out stitches for over two hours. The stitching I ripped out was intense pebbling around peacock feathers.... lots of work. 

 I have been working on a quilt for a month or so now, pretty simple, lots of negative space. After taking a few more classes on Craftsy.com, I wanted to make a quilt with lots of room to practice some new free-motion designs. Also, for this quilt I decided I wanted to use extra-thick batting. I wanted this quilt to be extra warm and usable and I was finding my quilts were rather thin for our winters here. This was going quite well, though I realized with extra- thick batting comes extra strained arms when putting the quilt through my domestic machine.

Extra thick batting = extra tricky placement in machine

You will notice that I trimmed the extra off the edges of the quilt because I am now quilting the border. I find sometimes that when I quilt the borders, I sometimes let the extra fabric flip under the area I am quilting, to prevent this I cut the excess off right before getting to the edges of the quilt.

This was the section after being re-quilted. I will never make that mistake again!!!

For this quilt I am trying to achieve a contrast in the quilting, not only the fabric selections. I am trying swirls in the printed sections and some straight line stippling in the crisp white.

contrast in quilting designs adds an extra element of design 

While all this has been stressful, ripping it apart, even changing the size of quilt, it makes it very worth it when its all done.

I am rather pleased with the peacock feathers I am quilting into the border, I will have some detailed photos of the finished project but it is also fun to see some before and afters. 

Peacock feather

On a side note it was such a busy week! While ripping out the stitches on this quilt I realized I had to finish this cake for my sisters birthday this evening! The craftier you are, the less time you have.