LRT7 – Structural/Stabilising Quilting and Wine?

This weekend I’ve done some structural or stabilizing quilting on Life’s Rich Tapestry. What’s amused me is the amount of concentration it takes to do long lines of ‘stitching in the ditch’. Most of the ‘ditch stitching’ that I’ve done before has been lots of short lines, so the fact that every time I day dreamed I caught the wrong piece of fabric was interesting. What’s more, I had a glass or two of wine at lunch time today, which seemed to make the first couple of rows easier, and the last couple harder (sleepiness setting in :-). On the whole, I’m quite pleased with the results anyway.

I’m trying to keep the pieces square with this stabilizing quilting, by starting with two horizontal lines on either side of the leaf border at the top of the quilt, then doing the vertical lines in the centre, which I’ll follow with stitching along the horizontal leaf border at the bottom (refer to the photo of the whole quilt below). While this appraoch has kept the squares and vertical lines of the centre section nice and straight, the horizontal border at the bottom seems to have stretched or moved, as had the outer border in the top right hand corner. The lead to the fabric puckering and the edge I was going to ditch stitch on the leaf border looking more like a scalloped one than a straight one (as shown in the photo above). So… I’ve repinned the bottom border and top right corner this afternoon and, as the photo to the leftshows, this seems to have smoothed out the issue enough and straightened the lines again.

Despite the slipping of the lower border of the quilt, last weekend’s approach to pins (refer LRT6 post) seemed to work – I had enough pins to keep the work stable, without getting in the way too much. I’m happy that the final result is both nice and even and straight. So any errors were from my trying to think about something else while I was quilting, not the pins :-D . And...here's the result.
Happy crafting until next time,
Bert