Two weeks later...

This is a gigantic Fire Island Hosta quilt, measuring in at 100"x106".  It is perfectly pieced, but immense.  Just the ditching of every pieced seam, which yes, I do...took a whopping 8 hours.  I think that the ditch stitching holds the perfect lines of the piecing.  It also allows me to ditch the entire quilt, and then go back with each individual color thread, rolling the quilt to where I want to be. Ditching is a great stabilizer, to the point where not that much other basting is needed.

 This has a single wool batt.  I used YLI polished poly and Glide threads in a variety of colors -- blues, white, peach.

 All of the fabrics on this quilt are non-prewashed batiks.  Now, this is not a bashing of the maker in any way shape or form.  Many, many people out there still choose for one reason or another not to prewash.  But, I want to try my hardest to convince you why you should change your ways.

Prewashing is good.  <>  Prewashing is good.

 When a quilt has fabrics that have not been prewashed (or presoaked), especially batiks, I absolutely refuse to premark the quilt.  THAT is something I like to do with monstrous quilts so that motifs can be symmetrical (and in case I forgot what I did 50" earlier!  Aquas and deep blues are some of the absolute hardest dyes to get to come out.  You can ask me how I know, but many of you read this blog 4 years ago when my Rainbow Nouveau quilt nearly bled into the non-usable realm.  I won't tough a batik without soaking it in very hot water for many hours, several times.

 One of the other things that happens with batiks -- and this is the one that sends most machine quilters to the hills screaming.  Sometimes, and this is a very unpredictable occurrence, these fabrics because they are supremely tight, can cause thread shredding and tension anomalies.  I have quilted many batik quilts this year, and I even let a few of the backings past my quality controller (normally I request no batik backs) - which caused no issues at all.  This quilt though tested every realm of calm I could muster.  Threads shredded.  Tension was periodically amuck.  And the kicker of them all, about a dozen broken needles.  The needle would hit a seam and just snap.  I just had my machine serviced and retimed a month ago, so this is not a welcome sight!  Luckily, I don't appear to have machine issues now.  The upshot is that because batiks are tight, it is very worth your while to prewash them because they do soften some.  I would even go so far as to say, use a regular cotton backing fabric too.  The Neimeyer quilts have many, many seams and thick intersections, which makes it even harder, as they are typically done in batik fabrics.

My issues translate to added time, mostly, which is not something I relish passing on to any customer. The end result is very gorgeous though.  She asked for dense custom, and definitely got it.  This is my favorite area... 

 The back is pretty too...

I knew I was forgetting something...Seven more hours to quilt a couple of matching pillow shams!  I took a couple days off after finishing the quilt to work on some class samples for next yr though (I call this sanity time!).

 No rest for the weary...Another (is this #5?) one of these is loaded and ready to start tomorrow.  This is definitely a 2-week project.  It will be good to have it out of the way before I go to MQX in 5 weeks though.

Happy Monday!