Nine days of hand quilting can be undone in less than an hour. Did you know that? No? Neither did I, until yesterday. My brilliant idea of hand quilting the ginormous minky monster wasn't such a great one after all. While researching how to work with minky I read that tying was the best way to secure the layers. This quilt is so large and heavy though that tying just didn't seem like it would be strong enough, so I decided to quilt it instead. The center block turned out beautifully! It took forever but it gave me the motivation to move on to the next block just below it.
That's where I ran into the trouble. :(
I'm not sure exactly why, but the more I quilted, the more distorted the block became. It puckered, it twisted, it bulged. It was just plain ugly. I stared at it, pulled at it, wished for it lay flat and pretty, but in the end it was just a lumpy mess. To be honest, if this quilt was for me, I would have rolled it in a ball and buried it deep in the depths of the UFO black hole. I can't though. Not this time. This one is bought and mostly paid for by someone else, so another day of sunlight it shall see.
The hardest part of ripping stitches out of minky is simply finding the stitches. Once you pop one you can gently tug the layers apart and pull the stitches a few at a time. Then it's hunt and peck for the next stitch using the tail of thread you just yanked loose.
I wanted to cry, more and more with each unsewn stitch. So, now I'm just angry that I've lost all of those days of work only to have to tie the damn quilt after all. That's what I get for not taking the advice of someone more experienced than myself.
