Lessons in Machine Quilting

So, Mother's Day 2012, I decided to make a table runner for my mom (post coming soon) and a John Deere themed wall hanging for my mother-in-law.

I don't have photos of the completed projects for either thing yet, but I did take photos mid-way through my wall hanging creating to illustrate a quick lesson I learned about machine quilting and color-matching.

As you can tell in the photos, I was using the traditional John Deere colors of dark green and sunny yellow.  This presented an interesting dilemma for the quilting.  My mother-in-law has taught me that when machine quilting, you don't want to overpower the quilt with a contrasting thread.  Instead, you want the quilting to blend in with the fabric.  Because the strips for the blocks on this wall hanging were about 2" wide each, and alternated, I could either have used yellow thread on the yellow strips and green on the green, or use one color throughout.  I decided to try a little bit of contrast and use yellow throughout.

Bad idea.

The first block, I did a stipple design (looks like puzzle pieces).  The result was a little jarring, so I tried a different design on the second block - loops and stars.  The result wasn't as bad, but it certainly wasn't good, either.

Stippled.  Massive yellow thread overload!

Loops and stars. Not as bad as stippled, but still not good, either.

I stopped after the second block, consulted with the hubby who agreed it was a little overkill, and decided to leave the fabric immediately around each block's center unquilted for the rest of the wall hanging.  That left the two already quilted blocks to deal with.  The only thing to do when stitching goes badly is...unpick the stitching. And HUGE thank you goes to my husband who spent a few hours doing just that for me!

Lesson learned:  Sometimes, a little quilting is all you need.