Juggling Quilting and SPRING

Oh my....... has it been over 2 weeks since my last communique?

I been quilting a bed quilt for a friend and about a third of the way through it I decided I didn't like how it was coming together...........so I tore part of it out.

That is SOOOOOOOOO soul destroying. To combat that I gave myself many liberal doses of SPRING and garden work. That, of course, played havoc with my back, so I hired a couple of young girls to do the bending and twisting.

Too bad I couldn't teach them to rip out stitches.

But I'm pleased to say, (and glad to inform my friend) the quilt is complete.

It's a very pretty and cheerful WHITE quilt with splashes of orange, blue brown and green.

Our original idea had been to use a loose meander over the quilt and place a design in each of the balloons. I decided last minute to change the whole quilt stitching to bubbles to compliment the balloons.
Stitching in the balloons came with issues of their own.
These were assembled by stitching a fusible interfacing to a circle and inverting the piece. This gave a perfect circle of any size with a fusible surface to mount the individual balloons to the quilt. I had advised my friend to further anchor the edges, which she did.
What I hadn't anticipated was the edge of the circle now contained 4 layers of material, and as you may know the material doesn't lie flat even if it is well clipped. In effect I was sewing through a total of 7 layers at the edges of the balloons, whether big or small.
Issues?
Oh yes!
My original plan was to stitch a circle around, close to the edge. All that material made it next to impossible to get an even line. When a design was stitched inside the circle, some required traveling again on that line. The result was akin to a child scribbling in different colours. This was not an issue on the top balloon side but on the white backing? it looked awful. So it had to go.

In addition, the bubbling around the design made it look as though the scribbling was an attempt to fill the empty space.
My solution was to remove all the balloons and fill the space with more bubbles.
This way the quilt is completely quilted. This removed the necessity of having to quilt the balloons on the top side. They only needed to be anchored. To do that I used a small, cm sized scallop.
This scallop motion allowed me to control the scooting movement of the unanchored material.

The result is much more subtle and still uniform. Touches of colour are there, and are distributed around the back of the white quilt. The piece is thoroughly quilted so washing will not be an issue.

I'm much happier and I know my friend will be as well.