the quilt that almost wasn't

Back in early May, I made this quilt using an upcoming line called Feather River from Birch Organic Fabric for quilt market. I was excited to work with this line as I really liked the colors and patterns in these fun prints.

I finished the quilt top with plenty of time to spare (despite that I had just returned home from my 3rd trip in 5 weeks) and got ready to quilt it with my walking foot. Well, no point in going into details again but my walking foot was "unavailable" so I figured instead I would FMQ (free motion quilt) it. That would have been no problem a year ago but since it has been about that long since I've FMQ'd anything bigger than a mini, I kind of had to remember how!

I started FMQing the flower pattern I used to use frequently but it was just awful so I did what I don't usually do and unpicked it and put on my regular piecing foot, thinking I could just straight line quilt with that. Well, um, nope - that didn't work at all. Though I will say it has before so I'm sure stress had something to do with this :)

So, I unpicked the stitches AGAIN and put the free motion foot back on and decided to try the loop quilting you can see in the photo BUT my thread kept breaking, my stitches kept skipping, and I can't even remember what else but it just wasn't working. I put a photo with a call for advice on Instagram and within minutes I had several people offering their help. Hours later, a couple of facetime chats, and tons of suggestions tried, I was still having some issues but on a much smaller scale and I was able to finish the quilt. Quilty friends are the best!

I should note that, because of all the travel, while I finished the quilt top with time to spare, I meant days, not the weeks it would have taken to bring my machine to the dealer and get it (and the walking foot) checked/fixed. Oh, and just FYI, the binding in the above photo is the canoes print from feather river - so cute!

Anyway, the quilt made it to quilt market and I just wrote a tutorial/pattern if you want to try this design yourself. You can find it on the Birch blog.
I really should write a post about all the helpful advice I received that enabled me to actually finish the quilt. Okay, adding it to the list . . .