First, Houston Festival is still a GO! We received word that Quilt Market is cancelled and it sent many questioning Festival. Quilt Market is the credential side of the Fall events that Quilts, Inc. put on in Houston. It was cancelled, my guess, from some major companies/manufactures not coming. And that is simply a guess. This does not effect Festival! I am mentioning this up front as my Done by Three class is almost full!!! If you are interested in taking the class or know of any friends that are interested, they need to get signed up! It is a great class for beginners or for anyone that collects Fat Quarters. The World of Bindings lecture has seats. It is in an auditorium, grin! They are adding more space to the classrooms so no worries about sharing table space with machine classes.

The next bit in the subject line is unpicking, often called frogging (rip-it,rip-it). I quilted a quilt and was adding more/extra quilting lines to a pantograph I was quilting. Nope! It was too much and took away from the design. So, good thing I only quilted one row instead of the entire quilt. So what took me less that 10 minutes to quilt, took 2 hours to take out. Why so long? Well, I was VERY careful to not rip the fabric and my tension of the stitches was great, nice and tight (more difficult to remove). Plus I had a bunch of sharp corners and I always have tiny stitches in those corners. A real pain to take out. I have had this lesson for myself a few times….STOP, decide if you like it before you quilt the entire row!!!

#1 – Don’t quilt it if you don’t like it! Or only quilt just a little bit to decide (not the entire row).

After I removed the stitching there are holes from the needle piercing the fabric and quilt layers. How to make those holes disappear? Washing the quilt will do it. But I’m not ready to wash it, I still have to bind it. So, a little water and a new toothbrush does the trick. See above, no holes!

#2- A dab of water and a toothbrush will make the holes disappear.

If you need to unpick, use a nice seam ripper with a tiny point. It is much easier to get a tiny point under the stitches. Plus, did you know that most seam rippers have a tapered side on the point. This helps the point of the seam ripper lift the stitch so you can slide the stitch down to the curved part that is there to cut the thread. You don’t actually pick the thread, you cut it.

May your quilting stitches be perfect and not have to be unpicked this week!

in quilting,

Debbie