Sunrise - Trouble of my own Making

I should have known better since I had noticed the ripple early on.

All that tight stitching over cloth batting and stabilizer gathered the edges of this piece every so slightly.....well quite a bit. My thought was "I can quilt it out."

HOWEVER,

by the time I added more cloth, 3 layers remember, as a border, there were just too many volatile spots.

FMQ  does have a tendency to tighten up and if it can move the material, it will.
So I was left with this ripple in the border. Bad enough, but my nice finished envelope edge was also distorted.

So I cut it off and spent yesterday finishing the outdoor chores instead. (Hummmph)

The thin barked maple was given protection, not so much against rabbits, as mice.

The same treatment for the corkscrew hazel.
They will happily endure up to 3 feet of snow and should "Monsieur Lapin" break through my barriers, they can trim the branches, not really harming the trees.

And I assembled the skeleton of my Winter porch display.
This won't be finished until after freeze up. The branches are placed into a framework of crisscrossing bricks, in a deep wine juice bucket. This is filled with water . When it freezes later this month the whole display will weigh well over 100lbs. No winter wind is going to shift that!



Then I humbly returned to my art...sigh!

After cutting off the edge I placed the whole piece on a new backing with a heavy embroidery stabilizer. I don't use this grade very often and certainly not on piece this big, but I was stuck. Either do it .......or toss it.
So now I had how many layers?
The "pink" cloth (1)
batting (2)
light stabilizer (3)
two layers of white cloth under the border print (6)
a heavy stabilizer and last (7)
backing material (8)
8 pieces of "material"....................my Juki was not a happy camper.

But I persevered. I had no choice. Thread broke again and again. I couldn't switch threads so I was stuck with the white on top, but I did change the bobbin thread to a mono filament. At least with that, the number of times I stopped and restarted is undetectable.

So tomorrow? It's back to finishing the grass. I have no idea what devilry that is going to bring, but I won't be surprised this time.

( all smoothed out and ready to finish....)
And after prepping the yard for winter?
The first and always fabulous snowfall............... magic