Sometimes nothing works

During the class I took in Phoenix last month, I drew out the designs for two wholecloth quilts. One of them must be redone, due to slithering problems, but the other (smaller) one is fine, so I began quilting it a few days ago. I quilted all of the main motifs and then added some cross hatching around the central wreath. So far, so good.

Then I decided to do pebbles as the filler around the corner motifs; pebbles are one of my favorite fillers. After doing half of one section, about 10-15 minutes’ work, I decided that this just wasn’t going to look right this time. Okay, so I spent the next three hours unpicking that mistake. 

I really don’t want to do a “traditional” stipple, so the next thing I tried was echo quilting around those corner motifs. It was looking pretty good until I realized something. The instructor for the class had required us to use the standard blue markers when doing our drawings — not the fine line type. So when I removed some of the blue lines to see how things were looking, I realized that the corner motifs were completely lost in the echo quilting! Ack! 

Last night I began unpicking those echoing lines, and I’m only about halfway done now. I may decide not to do a filler at all at this rate!