This was supposed to be an easy project to put together on my April sewing day with Stacia and Deloise. It turned out to be a two-day project. All of the little pieces were pre-cut and all I needed to do was stitch together the background strips, place and press the pieces onto the background, and then quilt. Easy peasy.

All went well until I moved to my quilting machine. I picked a new quilting stitch that was very similar to the mattress stitch that I often use. My thread kept breaking and after quilting a couple of lines I gave up. I changed my needle and cleaned my machine but the next two lines were no better. I spent the rest of the day taking out all of those little curvy stitches.

On day two I went back to the mattress stitch and did some testing on sample pieces – all seemed to go well. But on my first quilting line on the project I noticed I had some skipped stitches. So out came that row of quilting and I moved to my regular piecing machine.

I ended up with random straight lines up and down and across the piece in order to catch all those little leaves and flowers. As I was sewing the binding on I realized I had forgotten the sleeve for hanging but I wasn’t about to start ripping out stitches again.

I like the finished project but it was definitely not easy.