Reckless Quilting: What If I Rip My Custom Quilt Off the Frame, Dump It On the Pool Table, and Try to Put It Back On Later?

Reckless driving is driving with a "willful or wanton disregard for the safety of people or property," as defined by Florida Statute 316.192. Examples include high-speed driving, swerving, unsafe lane changes, and fleeing a law enforcement officer.  Reckless QUILTING is deciding on a whim to conduct an experiment on a quilt that you've been working on (and striving for perfection on) for nearly four years.  Friends, I admit it: I am a Reckless Quilter, guilty as charged.

When one of my longtime clients reached out to me recently to ask whether I could possibly quilt this 40" x 42" baby quilt in time for her granddaughter's birthday, I had already loaded my Deco quilt for custom quilting but I was procrastinating getting started.  I actually agreed to do this baby quilt for Carrie in order to "light a fire under my behind" and force myself to get my Deco quilt either finished, or lightly quilted from top to bottom with enough stabilization and basting to secure all three layers so I could safely zip it off my frame (my Bernina long arm frame has zippered leaders for just this purpose) and zip on another set of leaders for the baby quilt.  

Carrie's 40 x 42 Strawberries Baby Quilt

But alas -- the time came when I needed to get the baby quilt on the frame and, since I had indulged myself by doing some decorative quilting as I went along instead of sticking to boring stitch in the ditch as planned, my Deco quilt only had quilting securing the three layers for the top third of the quilt, with the quilt top, batting and backing loose for the bottom two thirds of the quilt.  What would happen if I took the quilt off the frame just the way it was, I wondered?  Would I be able to get it loaded again afterwards and complete the custom quilting without any issues?  I consulted the Internet, and the Internet had no answers for me.

HYPOTHESIS: 

If a custom quilt in progress is attached to a long arm quilting frame with zipper leaders, and if it is possible to remove and reattach a basted quilt using these zipper leaders, then I should be able to remove and reattach a partially quilted, UNbasted quilt with the zipper leaders.

So I unzipped all three leaders, carried the monster quilt-in-progress over to the pool table in the room next to my studio, and dumped it there for about four or five hours while I loaded and quilted the little baby quilt with an edge-to-edge design.

Yes, I Ripped My Deco Quilt Off the Frame and Dumped It On the Pool Table

The baby quilt would have gone faster if Windows hadn't decided to start installing an update that froze my Q-Matic software after the first row of quilting.  Still, the Deco quilt wasn't off the frame and in a heap long enough to get all wrinkled.  Mainly I piled it on the pool table because I didn't want it to drag on the floor in the game room and get any dust bunnies or whatever stuck to the batting.

Strawberries Loaded Sideways on Purpose

The Strawberries quilt was loaded sideways deliberately, by the way, for two reasons.  First, both the quilt top and the backing fabric had directional motifs that both needed to be right side up on the finished quilt.  I like to load the Minky with the straight selvages pinned to my leaders to avoid the risk of stretching the Minky with my backing clamps.  But most importantly, I felt this particular edge to edge design would look better on the quilt if the rows of strawberry vines  were quilted vertically rather than horizontally.  It disguises the "row by row" quilting effect that you get sometimes with pantograph quilting patterns and makes it look more organic to my eye.

Carrie liked my suggestion of Glide thread in Mint for this quilt when I showed her my thread pick against her backing fabrics, but she was less certain how the Mint thread would look across the red and dark pink fabrics:

Mint Glide Thread Over Hot Pink Fabrics

See?  It actually blends in better than a more typical white or off white thread choice.  That's because there would be so much more of a value difference between an off white thread and the deep reds and pinks.  The Mint thread is just a little darker than the background fabrics, and a little lighter than the reds and pinks.  I always audition potential quilting threads across all of the major fabrics in a quilt, because I am a very careful and conscientious quilter when I am working on OTHER people's quilts.  I am only fast and dangerous with my own projects!

Here's what Carrie's quilt top looked like before quilting.   Such a sweet pattern and I love the variety of prints she used.  That's the other reason I agreed to quilt this for Carrie -- I knew it would be fun and a nice break from the stitching in the ditching!

Carrie's Quilt Top Before Quilting

Like I said, my Deco quilt was off the frame for less than 8 hours.  Are you dying to know what happened when I tried to put it back on the frame?  Okay.  I probably should have taken pictures as I was doing this for the sake of Internet Posterity, but woulda shoulda coulda etc.

METHODS:

First I zipped the Pickup Leader back onto the frame.  That's the bar at the back of the frame, and that's the top edge of the quilt where all three layers were secured with quilting.  I rolled that up onto the Pickup bar to the point where I'd left off quilting.  

Next, I flipped the quilt top and batting layers up and out of the way so I could focus on the backing.  I zipped the bottom edge of the backing onto the Backing Leader at the front of the frame and rolled it up as evenly as I could manage with those other layers still sort of in my way -- remember that this is a gigantic 102" x 102" bed quilt so there is a lot of fabric and bulk to wrestle with and it's a lot easier to load a quilt one layer at a time.  Or maybe I just have more experience loading a quilt one layer at a time and my familiarity with that process makes it seem easier.  It definitely didn't seem easy the first time I tried to load a quilt...

I thought I had that backing layer rolled nicely and evenly, so I pulled the batting down and smoothed it out over the taut backing and let it hang down in front of the machine as usual.  Last, I zipped the bottom edge of the quilt top onto the Quilt Top leader (also at the front of the frame) and rolled that up as straight and evenly as I could.  It's actually easier to roll a pieced quilt up straight because you can use the piecing seam lines as reference points to be sure you aren't rolling one side of the quilt top tighter than the other side -- this is actually a real thing to watch out for, because your dominant hand tends to roll tighter than your non dominant hand, or maybe it's the other way around.

RESULTS:

Anyway, once I'd finished reattaching the zipper leaders and rerolling the quilt onto my frame, it looked pretty good overall, but the quilt was sagging on the frame on the left side.  Because this is my own personal quilt and I vacillate between extreme perfectionism and reckless endangerment, I know that this quilt backing is as straight and as mathematically square as humanly possible.  There was no sagging before my quilt went off to play pool for a few hours, and the zipper leaders ensured that everything was aligned exactly as before when I reattached the quilt to the leaders.  The only wild card was rolling it all up, and I must have rolled the right side tighter than the left.  

It was late by the time I got to this point and I decided to call it a night.  When I left the studio, I thought the issue was with the quilt backing layer alone.  Coming back to it after a good night's sleep, I reevaluated and decided to take up the slack by shoving some batting scraps up under my pickup roller as shown in the photo below:

Back On the Frame, My Quilt Survived the Experiment!

This batting trick is something I learned from other long arm quilters and it's most useful when you're quilting one of those digital edge to edge designs where precise alignment of the rows of quilting is crucial, like a clamshell quilting pattern.  If the quilt is rolling up unevenly for whatever reason you can get a gap at the looser side where the points of the top row of clamshells doesn't touch the curves of the clamshells below.  

With this custom quilt, each digital design is mapped out and positioned individually for stitching one block at a time.  There is no aligning needing to be done in the computer program every time I advance the quilt on the frame.  The rest of the quilting is hand guided ruler work and maybe some free motion.  Really, the only things that matter are whether the backing is smooth and straight and without wrinkles (it is; I crawled under the frame to check), whether the batting layer is smooth and without wrinkles (also good) and whether the quilt top is straight and smooth.  In the morning, with a fresh cup of coffee in hand and a much more positive attitude, I observed that my quilt top IS nice and straight coming off that quilt top roller at the front of my frame.  How do I know this?  Look at the row of purple diamonds on the roller bar, and the row of yellow diamonds right along that top edge.  It was at the top of the quilt, the already quilted portion right near the "dead bar"/leveling bar at the back of the frame, where I could see that my green patchwork squares were more exposed on the left side of the quilt where it was sagging.  I shoved that batting scrap in there just enough to get those drifting green squares in alignment with the other blocks because I had confirmed that my "issue" was because of how the already quilted, secured portion of the quilt had been rerolled onto the pickup roller.  Much faster solution than unrolling and rerolling.

CONCLUSIONS:

While it is possible to remove a partially quilted but unbasted quilt from the frame and reload it for quilting later, it is more time consuming and there is a greater potential for issues compared to zipping off a partially quilted but fully basted quilt that has only two zipper leaders in play and all three layers of the quilt secured down the entire length of the quilt.  In retrospect I may have been better off stitching a grid of basting stitches down the unquilted bottom two thirds of the quilt prior to removing it from the frame if I didn't have time to complete the ditch stitching.  But minimal basting can create its own problems when the eventual much denser quilting shifts the layers more and now you have a pleat or a bulge developing at the bottom of the quilt top each time you take out a row of basting and smooth the unquilted work area from top to bottom.  Also long arm needles are pretty big, size 100/16 is what I typically use, so the needle holes from all of that basting are glaringly obvious if you don't want to wash your quilt immediately.  It was easier for me to get the custom quilt back on the frame and get back into quilting it the times when I'd completed all of the stabilizing stitch in the ditch quilting from top to bottom, securing all three layers of the quilt, before removing it from the frame.  That's what I did with my Jingle quilt and with my friend Marybeth's sampler quilt when I needed to take a break from the custom grind and get some edge to edge projects quilted.

Next time I post, I'll let you know how that turns out, and I'll share my Stonefields appliqué progress with you!

I'm linking up today's post with my favorite linky parties:

MONDAY

Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

Monday Musings at Songbird Designs  

TUESDAY

To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt  

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

THURSDAY

Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

FRIDAY

Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

 TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday

SUNDAY

Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts

Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework