Adventures in Blocking and Bleeding

Pinned to the floor

I finished Creekbed last November.  My sister snagged it, declaring it looked perfect on her living room wall.  (I have to admit - it does look good there!)  However, she didn't like how the bottom bowed out.  I'm sure I stretched the fabric on the setting triangles while sewing on the wavy border.  I told her to bring it back to me and I'd block the quilt.

I wet it down and spent a chunk of time Thursday evening squaring and pinning it to a throw rug in the sun room.  Perfect.  I left it to dry overnight.  When I checked on it on Friday morning, I discovered several of the reds and blues had bled all over the white sashing.  Oh no!

I prewash my fabrics, so this was a nasty surprise.  I recalled reading blog posts on bleeding quilts and went with instructions I found on Colorways by Vicki Welsh.  Happily the quilt had not completely dried and we had Dawn detergent on hand.  I soaked the quilt for an hour, changed the water (which was quite dark), soaked it again for nearly 12 hours.  The water still wasn't quite clear by dinner time, although the bleeding had mostly cleared up (it was hard to tell fabric from stain since the white fabric was fairly transparent when wet).  I changed the water again and left it to soak overnight.   The water was clear by morning.  I threw the quilt into the washer to rinse out the rest of the soap. 

Having fixed the bleeding, I was back to blocking.  Work was like this last week, too:  started a project, have things go terribly wrong, then finally get back to what I was trying to accomplish after fixing things I never wanted to do in the first place.  So I pinned the quilt back on the floor, straight and square, and discovered it shrank about three quarters of an inch.  I checked back after a couple of hours and found it had dried quite a bit.  I could confirm the red bleeding had come out completely.  Yay!  There was a hint of blue from one of the darkest stripes, but the rest of the blue had come out, too.  Whew.  It looked a lot better than it had the previous day.

The quilt looked completely flat when I removed the pins later.  I hung it up and the darned thing still had a bit of a ripple on the bottom.  My mother witnessed the unpinning and hanging and was equally amazed.  However, as we stepped back from the wall, the quilt looked great.  The slight ripple was only noticeable because we knew where to look.  I was able to hand the quilt back to my sister later that day; she was very pleased with the results.  

I may consider soaking some of my darker fabrics rather than simply washing them, especially if I am paring them with very light fabric.  At least I've seen first hand how to fix a bleeding quilt.

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Love Laugh Quilt - Monday Making