A Lesson for Me -- Rework of Finished Quilt

We've had a couple of glorious sunsets since my sister left (sorry, Gail and Bill) so of course I ran down to get pictures as they are always different.

This blog post is dedicated to correcting a mistake on a quilt I thought I had done yesterday!  It was driving me crazy last night in bed so this morning I took out all the quilting i did in the border and removed the whole border!!  It took longer than doing the quilting to begin with.  I had closely quilted the background of the mandalas and so the borders were just oversized and wonky.  I had hoped quilting them would reduce their size but it didn't do it enough.  The quilt actually shrunk 4 inches due to the close quilting!

I have been pin basting by pinning the quilt back, batting and top on my design wall, putting 6 inch by 24 inch rules behind them and then pinning.  This works pretty well for smallish quilts.  I have no good basting surface down here.  You can see the pins here that hold the ruler in place.  I am going to use basting spray instead for the next bunch as I think that will be even easier!!

This is the quilting I did in each of the smaller blocks.  I was pleased with how it looked.

This is a closeup of the quilting I did in the center 22 inch square.  I am finally not afraid of quilting the mandalas now that I kind of have a routine.

Here is a picture of what it looked like after it was completely quilted.  You probably can't see all the pebble quilting that fills the white area.  The border is now "baggy" and after all the detailed quilting I did on this quilt, I couldn't bear to have it look so ripply around the outside.  Today I spent the day taking out the quilting and removing the whole border.

It is redone and you can see that the border is different as well.  It had always bothered me that I hadn't repeated the turquoise somewhere else so I used it as the first border and then cut down the other fabric so that I wouldn't have to do any more quilting in the border.  It is nice and square now and quite a bit smaller!!  I was okay with leaving out the thin green border as I didn't feel the need to repeat it.  As this shrinking has happened to me before, I am serious thinking of not putting on any borders until after the centers are quilted.  The last quilt top I finished will be an additional candidate for this process.  I HATE redoing things but am a compulsive finisher.