I've gone against my principles

For the past several years -- well, since my kids were not napping, and when I was a well enough known quilter to actually get custom quilts, I have chosen not to quilt the larger of them in the summer.  Occasionally, I hold onto one that I can get done during a week when I might get my kids to a camp or off to my mom's for several days.  That's not happening this summer, but somehow it seems I have quite a few custom quilts anyhow.  Most of these are on hold until September, but one somehow did not arrive before school got out.  Then my machine was AWOL for 2 weeks, putting other commitments behind schedule. I know, whoa is me.  The last thing I wanted to do when my kids got out of school was toss them to their electronics and own doings, but that is what had to happen. Yesterday, guilt took over and I took two of them to one of our favorite haunts by the shore, hiked on the rocks, got ice cream and then picked strawberries.  We all needed a break. 

But the good news is that the quilt I was working on is done...well just about.  I discovered one place I need to fix, but that can be done on my DSM.  It is hugely huge - larger than my hallway. This is Judy Nieymeyer's Vintage Rose pattern.

 It has SO much white batik.  It makes the quilting show beautifully, despite much of the thread being white too.

 This is a challenging pattern for longarmers with a frame under 34".  LOL - we all know that there is no frame this big!  The sections on the design are large and required a good bit of rolling back and forth to quilt.  If you try to budget and cost quilts, keep this in mind.

I snuck in a little soft aqua and soft lime green thread.  It does not show too much in the pictures, but more in real life.  The colored areas, though, all were accented with a variegated Fantastico thread.  It ties the rainbow look together.

 This particular Neimeyer design has a lot of floating geese that are NOT at all convenient to ditch.  It just about killed me to leave them unditched, but seriously, that would have taken forever.  I do have boundaries, and that was one of them!

 I tried to keep the quilting playful and with plenty of movement.

 And then I thought I was about finished.  But I discovered I made a HUGE error.  This is a totally rookie mistake.  I am such a stickler for making notes and taking photos as I quilt, especially the larger quilts.  They are my best resource for remembering what I DID, when that section is not visible.  I discovered that I added 1/2" frames on the bottom half of the quilt, but not on 3 of the 4 sections nearer to the top (like I marked below).  Tell me I wasn't madder than a hornet to be faced with picking out 3 large sections of feathers.  Really, I was.

Here's what I did.  I marked the top where it needed to be stitched and ripped out only the feathers that extended into this area.  The ends were knotted and buried.  It meant I only had to remove 1/3 to 1/2 of the quilting, not all of it. I then requilted the missing feathers. 

The finished feathers look just like they were supposed to. This lesson is included so that you realize that even quilters that custom quilt day after day make silly mistakes too!