Turtle in a Blender is Finished!!!!

As I said in the last post, machine quilting and I do not get along. I usually try to machine quilt my miniature pineapple quilts. I even tried to machine quilt this one. It did NOT look good at all! So, I ripped all of the quilting out and started over, by hand.

For large quilts, I use a hoop stand. For the mini, I decided to use a hoop that I normally only use when I teach hand quilting classes. When I got to the borders, there wasn't enough fabric to get a nice grip on the edge of the border, so I sewed spare fabric to the edges of the quilt to give me that little extra that I needed. The fabric I used is actually an old, worn out, torn pillow case. I just machine pieced it to the backing fabric and batting, using the longest stitch on my machine. Then I was able to rip it out in no time when I was finished.

The first two pictures of the quilting in progress show the colors of the quilt more accurately than the photo of the completed quilt. I finished it after dark and the lighting in my bedroom isn't very conducive for good shots. Just a little FYI, I used the green "turtle shell batik" fabric on the back of the quilt also.

One thing that made all the ripping of machine stitches quicker was some wonderful tweezers! They are actually sharper than I realized and I was able to slip them under the long stitches I used to sew the old pillow case to the backing and batting instead of using a seam ripper. Then I could just loosen a few stitches and then rip one so that I could use the tweezers to pull the thread. It was super quick! The tweezers had only been used in the past to pick the paper foundation patterns off of the blocks after I had completed the blocks. It's nice to find another use for them.