Vintage Runner

Awhile ago I got this table runner quilt top from my mother-in-law that was made by her mother and grandmother. I offered to finish quilting it, but it sat in my sewing room for a few months as I didn't want to use straight-line quilting on this. I wanted to wait until I knew how to do free-motion before tackling this.

Yesterday I decided to just go for it, after getting my Handi Quilter Sweet 16 all set up. I went with a design that highlighted each quarter-square triangle column. I did some flowery and leafy designs as well as some wavy back and forth. Quilting on my Handi Quilter is so much fun! It is much easier to see and to navigate, and even though I have the stitch regulator, turns out I don't like using it. It actually throws my rhythm off.

During quilting, the backing flipped over and I accidentally stitched it down, and didn't discover until a lot of stitches had gone through. It ended up costing nearly 2 hours to tear all those stitches out. Also, this quilt was difficult to quilt because the seams were quite bulky, I'm pretty sure my Pfaff wouldn't have been able to handle it. My HQ handled it just fine, but the bulky intersections provided a challenge.

Now that I'm done, I'm not sure whether I should be proud of it or not. I alternately think it looks good and that it doesn't. Perhaps I really need to take a step back and maybe it'll look better later. I definitely like quilting more than piecing ... which means I need to find more quilt tops to finish.