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

Stonefields Applique Prepped, Blocks 5-13 + Applipops vs Perfect Circle Templates

Good morning, my lovelies!  I have been having so much fun prepping my Stonefields Month One appliqué blocks this week!  You know, digging through scrap bins and working with scissors and something suspiciously similar to Elmer's School Glue to put these little blocks together makes me feel like I've been transported across space and time back to kindergarten arts and crafts.  It's magical and so cathartic.  If you are someone who admires appliqué from a distance but thinks "I'd never have the patience," I urge you to give it a try sometime.  It is so much like those school projects from decades ago where we dug through old catalogs and wallpaper sample books and construction paper scraps from other projects, cutting things out with our safety scissors (we were fussy cutting!) and trying to eat the paste when the teacher wasn't looking.  I know of no other pastime that can make me forget my arthritis and my wrinkles, dissolve all the cares of the world, and make me feel like a 5-year-old again.

Here are my Stonefields Blocks 5-13, prepped and ready for stitching:

Stonefields Blocks 5-13, Prepped and Ready to Stitch

When I say that my blocks are "prepped and ready for stitching," I mean that I've made heat resistant plastic templates for all of the applique shapes, selected the fabrics, traced the shapes onto the wrong side of my fabric scraps with a pencil, cut the shapes out with an eyeballed scant 1/4" turning allowance, and preturned those seam allowance/turning allowances by wetting them with starch and pressing them back over the edges of the heat resistant templates.  Then I used the pattern sheets and a light box to position the applique shapes on my background fabric and basted them in place temporarily using tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue Baste-It (this post contains affiliate links).  I put those drops of glue about an eighth to a sixteenth inside the edge of the patch so I won't be hand stitching through the glue.  By the way, this preparatory process is exactly the same regardless of whether I was planning to stitch the shapes down by hand or with my sewing machine using an invisible appliqué stitch.  If sewing by machine I would just need to slip scraps of tearaway embroidery stabilizer beneath each block before stitching to prevent puckering.  I'm not going to promise that there won't be any machine stitched applique on this quilt, but for now I'm going to stitch my applique by hand using my favorite YLI 100 wt Silk thread and my Bohin size 12 Applique Needles.  I love how these thin needles and thread create truly invisible stitches that just sink into my fabric and disappear.