Good, bad and ugly.

or the pros and cons?

Should I rip out or not?

I took this one off the longarm Sunday afternoon, but not without some stressing over thread of all things.  

I wanted to do the navy sawtooth in navy and the cream in a light gold thread, but the navy that I had was a King Tut thread and I hadn't used that yet.  From what I hear that can be a bear of a thread to get the tension right.  What I heard was true.  If I had to order thread, it would take a minimum of a week to get here so I thought I would give it a try since I needed to get another quilt on the longarm that had a deadline.  

Before doing anything though, I had to draw up the quilt pattern that I wanted to put on the block.  In my mind's eye, I was seeing straight lines and I had it suggested to me to do this particular design with curves and I was having a hard time getting it to wrap around my brain.  So I drew it up on my erasable board and put it in front of me while I was quilting.  

This helped a lot. 

So...on to my tension. I think I had it "pretty good" so I did my piano keys first...top and bottom and then did the navy sawtooth.  I was using the navy King Tut on top and the gold So Fine in the bobbin.   For some reason, halfway through quilting these areas, I decided I needed to tweak my bobbin tension. Don't ask me why! I continued to quilt and the top looked fine, but lo and behold, when I saw my back, I had an occasional navy loop.  Darn!

I took the quilt off the frame and turned it to do the other two sides of piano keys.  

This picture shows the backing after the navy sections were done.  

Then I did all the cream areas with the golden So Fine thread.  I had no problem with this thread at all.  

I really like how this is quilted.  It kind of gives it movement.  

So, I struggled and fretted with thread, went through the whole quilt with one color and then re-wound the quilt to do the other color thread (this alone could cause puckers in the back if not careful), took the quilt OFF the frame and turned it to do the other two sides of the piano keys (another potential for problems).  All this to show that I went to a lot of trouble and to have little navy loops on the back makes me crazy.  

Do I hold off on trimming and binding so that I can do some ripping and re-quilting?

or do I use this as a very big learning experience and leave it at that.  The top looks good and maybe washing it will make some of those little mistakes disappear in all that lovely "crinkling" that cotton quilts tend to do.  

It's mine.  It's not like it is a customers. 

We will see.