When You Don't Like the Quilting

Surely I'm not the only one who has started quilting a quilt, then a little while into it, you decide you don't like the quilting design you decided on. What do you do in that case? I'll tell you what I won't do, unless I'm having tension issues, I'm NOT going to rip out the quilting. 

When I got home after three months of living in a hotel, I wanted to get back to my FMQ an hour a day routine. I had a few quilts basted and ready to quilt, and I chose one of the larger ones.  It's a generous twin sized quilt. It's been a while since I used my walking foot for quilting, and I thought it might be fun to do that. I decided to start with a wavy line going diagonally down the quilt.

It didn't take me long to realize that the last time I used this technique, I was on my Bernina, not the Janome. My Bernina has a walking foot, the Janome has dual feed, which seems like they are the same, but they actually feel a bit different. I'm sure I will get better at quilting wavy lines with the Janome, but I need more practice for that. It only took a few lines to make me realize that I did not like how it was coming out. 

I was having a hard time making the wavy lines as wavy as I wanted. Mostly, they just looked crooked. I decided I didn't like it after quilting six or so lines. I was not going to rip that out, so my plan was to quilt enough lines that it looked purposeful, then I'd switch to FMQ. This quilt is super busy, so I knew any quilting design I used wasn't going to show up that much, even with me choosing red thread for the quilting.

Once I had about a two foot wide section of walking foot quilting going diagonally down the quilt. I quilted spirals in the other corners. 

I finished the quilting this morning, and I'm not sorry I approached it this way. The quilt is busy enough that it didn't really matter what quilting design I chose, the quilting was going to get lost in the busy-ness of the quilt. That being said, I think this approach would also work with a much less busy quilt. I've often heard quilt teachers say, "Do it once on a quilt and it's a mistake, do it several times and it's a design choice".

I tried to get a couple pics so you can see the spirals next to the lines. It looks fine to me. I'll take a pic of the whole quilt once the binding is on, and you'll see how little the quilting shows up. Even if it hadn't been so busy, I wouldn't have ripped out the quilting. Life is short, and less than ideal quilting is not worth my time to rip out. 

I'm still going to try quilting wavy lines with my Janome, but maybe on a smaller quilt next time. I've also done wavy lines freemotion, and that's definitely another option. I really want to up my walking foot quilting game, so if my arm is bothering me I can have the machine do more of the work for me. 

I've got about 1/3 of the rally bags sewn now. I'll run the drawstrings through after they are all sewn. All the bags are started, they are sewn front to back, I'm just bouncing around now one whether I'm just securing the side seams or actually finishing the bag. My goal was to have the rally bags finished by next weekend, and I'm not sure I'll make that goal. The next week is super busy for me. A couple grandkids having a sleepover, babysitting a couple others later in the week. Hopefully I'll have at least 2/3 of them done by next weekend.