Dealing with Issues

Whe I realized that I had not posted since Monday, the reality of my week began to settle in. It's been busy and not always in a good way. I am still dealing with the draftsman that is drawing up the prints for our house remodel. Seems everytime I get a revision drawing to correct one thing, he has botched something else. It just makes me silly. Wednesday delivered us with our 2nd snow day of the year. All 3 kids were home from school, as we got nearly 15" of snow. Good thing I got awesome new snow boots recently! After our 1st snowstorm of the season last month, I realized my old boots (which were not really very comfortable anyways) were nowhere to be found. The kids all loved the snow, but dear old Mom isn't that fond of having to snow blow and shovel! Afterall, it was a day when I should have gotten 5 hours of quilting in, and I barely got 1. Whoa is me.
I am very soon to be taking this off of the frame for the 2nd time. It's not officially completed, but is much closer. I have one border (or maybe 2) that I need time to reconsider, and get going on some customer work before my trip in 10 days and my kids's vacation next month.
The next picture shows what the quilt looked like when I took it off the frame 2-3 weeks ago. There are places unquilted, and places I have altered. Pay perticular attention to the rosette.

I liked the idea of doing the concentric lines along the rosette, but they proved to be hard to do well. Once I removed the blue marking pen, I was mildly horrified how crooked many of them looked. On top of that, I was never really committed on how to do the black & green background behind the rosette. After I had requilted the areas of the borders that I showed last post, I started ripping this center out. It is the quilt's focal point, and just cannot look crappy.

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Here's what I came up with. I have done radiating rays every 5 degrees through the rosette and through the interlocking border. Then I decided that it would be nice to feather the rosette spokes since the detail quilting shows better on the lighter fabrics. It looks decent on the ivory. The light gray was a total pain to quilt because the fabric has lousy visibility (lotsa mottling). I think it still looks alright. At any rate, it is better than my first attempt. It ought to - it took about 6-8 hours to pick out and then about 8-10 hours to quilt. I know, hard to believe. The visibility or lack thereof just slows me down a lot. Plus there are lots of stops and starts to have to bury.

Now the thing with this rosette that I have not mentioned yet is that it has a problem. Oddly, I have yet to get too worked up about it. Considering I am a Type A, I am very surprised that I have not completely flipped. Afterall there's about 75 hours in this so far, just in the quilting. What have I done, you wonder??...When I pieced each of the 15 degree sections for the rosette, I had to hand cut the pieces since they are curved. I traced templates with an aqua sharpie pen, then cut them out. Before I sandwiched the quilt, I noticed some of the aqua pen on the edges of the medallion pieces and shrugged it off, thinking that it had to have been heat set given all the ironing they went through. Hmmph. Famous last words, Fool. The first time I tried to remove the blue marking pen, I started seeing little bits of aqua. Holy crap. I couldnt believe my eyes. Well, now I am in hard persuit of a remedy for the pen. My readings onthe internet indicate that these pens are not really permanent, and that the right amount of patience, repetition and choosing the proper removal method can (WILL) get the staining (OK, now bleeding) out. I looked rather suspicious at the grocery store buying four bottles of rubbing alcohol. I have tried that on the frame, but I will get more aggressive once it is off - trying stain stick, full immersion and other suggested tricks. I hate to resort to a bleach pen because it will affect the back of the quilt, but it's better that the front look acceptable than the back! If ANYONE has a remedy for these pens that they thought worked, please tell me!

And the quilt does have a name now, but you will just have to wait for a grand reveal.