Quilting has been challenging, mostly for unexpected reasons. Problem #1 is expected - the quilt isn't telling me how it wants to be quilted. I doodled a lot and shot down lots of ideas. I ended up with very simple waves, following some of the pieced bits. I'm not entirely convinced it's the right way to go - I find myself wondering if I should have just done an all-over pattern.
Regardless, that's not the sticking point. The quilt is literally sticky. All this humidity. I've cleaned and waxed the surfaces like I usually do, but the quilt does not want to glide under my sewing machine. I've not had that happen before. This is a small quilt, too. Second trial - I hit the blue and white fabric and I'm skipping stitches all over. I vaguely recall that the screen printed fabric required a big needle. I'm quilting with a 16 needle. Ridiculous. But it worked. I swapped out the needle once I hit back into normal fabric.
I had simply pinned the sandwich because it was so small. I managed to stab myself so many times quilting this small section I went back and basted the whole thing. So we'll see where today goes.... As long as it doesn't require me to rip out everything, I'll be happy. I'm still not convinced this is going to look right when I'm done quilting.
Making the actual quilting fit your vision of how you want the finished quilt to look can be really challenging! Hope it goes smoothly for you as you get farther along.
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