After almost 6 years of daily use, my daughter's bed quilt came back home with me for some TLC last August. When I visited my daughter last summer, she showed me several places where the hand quilting was coming out.
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Broken hand quilted stitching |
I thought there were only a few spots and expected to make a some quick repairs while I was visiting, but when we went over the blocks indivudually, there were many, many spots with broken stitching.
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More broken hand quilted stitching |
It looks like the thread just broke in multiple places. In hindsight, I realize the thread I used to quilt was rather old, and probably not very strong anymore. Cue daughter's sad face. For life reasons, this quilt means a lot, so the quilt came home with me so I could ponder the best way to extend its life.
I thought I could pull out stitches on either side of each break so I could knot and bury the thread to secure the stitching, then stitch new stitches in the gaps. After mulling this over for a while, it occurred to me that if the thread of the original stitches had broken in so many places, more breaks would inevitably pop up after I repaired the current breaks.
Re-quilting the whole quilt by hand wasn't an option. It took me a year and a half to quilt it the first time, and that was before I started getting tingling in my fingers after less than a half hour of stitching.
Machine quilting was one option, but daughter and I both wanted to preserve the look of the hand stitching. In the end, I came up with a compromise.
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Walking foot quilting in the ditch |
I'm going to stitch in the ditch along all the curves. I had hand quilted in the ditch originally, so those stitches are being covered up by the machine quilting, but it's hidden in the ditch so it won't change the look of things much.
All the visible hand stitching will stay as is. Some will inevitably disappear where the thread has broken or will break, but some will survive and hopefully maintain the original character of the quilt. The machine quilting in the ditch is dense enough to keep the layers together no matter what happens to the hand stitching.
It's a bit of a chore to turn the quilt, especially when lots of it need to go through the machine's throat space.
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Lots of bunching to get through the throat |
A little easier when there's less quilt on the right and more on the left...
I think it looks OK on the back too. If you look carefully you can make out the machine stitching over old hand quilting, the hand quilting I'm leaving as is, and a break in the original stitching.
I think it's going to work out. I just need to keep plugging away a little each day so I finish the quilting in time to take it back to British Columbia next month when we attend her graduation from UBC.
Just keep stitching, just keep stitching...
Joanne
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Pattern was Chic Country by Sew Kind of Wonderful. I added borders and tweaked the colours in the edge blocks to blend into the border. |
PS: If you would like to see the evolution of this quilt, I blogged about it in progress many times
- March 2016 - First peek at the fabric pull
- November 2016 - Starting to cut fabric
- January 2017 - Starting to piece and failing random colour placement
- February 2017 - Redesiging the border and finishing the top
- January 2018 - hand quilting progress
- August 2018 - progress update
- January 2019 - finshed quilt on the blog (finished in late December)