While house/kid sitting the past week, I brought along some hand sewing to occupy some of the down time. Although I made this quilt quite a while ago, maybe even a couple of years, I had not finished the binding. It was a year long, mystery, row by row quilt class. You received the block pattern and instructions on making the block each month, then you went home and made however many blocks that were required to make a row. The number of blocks needed to make a row depended on the size of the block.



As a bonus to taking the row by row class, at the end of the year long class, your quilt was long arm quilted at no extra cost. And this is where the trouble began.....

I won't mention the name of the shop that offered the class and quilting, but they are no longer in business for other reasons. Anyway, I finished the top and turned it in for quilting. The quilting was so sparse that I took it back and they added more quilting by quilting between the rows already quilted. There were areas of 10" to 12" with absolutely no quilting! You know how a quilt feels "quilty" after it's been quilted? It just has a wonderful feel and drape. This quilt felt like simple layers of fabric, nothing else, because of the sparse quilting. OK, so it gets more quilting which helped things immensely. It is far from being even moderately quilted, but I felt like I could put it in a washing machine without it completely bunching up and falling apart. Now.....when your long arm quilter isn't paying attention to the backside, it can turn out like this next picture. There were evenly spaced borders around the green center and now, on one side, the black border is completely gone! You can't see the scale here, but this is a long, skinny, twin sized quilt and those extra borders were about 8" wide. That means that when this quilt was placed on the long arm frame for quilting, it was 8" off center. An inch or so off center happens often, but 8" is negligence.




Well, at least this beast is finished! It's been sitting around in my craft room for ages, just leering at me and reminding me of the poor quilting. I lost my enthusiasm for completing the binding and put it away. It was a lot of work to piece this quilt and to see it finished with very poor quilting was hard to swallow. Oh well, life certainly goes on. At least this is a quilt that will get some use, as I won't feel like I need to save it for special occasions. I think it will make a great picnic quilt!
(Thanks for listening to my ranting!)