Houndstooth Turtles Quilt Finally Over With

Houndstooth Turtles is the first quilt I ever made as kind of a proof of concept to see if I could actually do it. Having just learned to use a rotary cutter, I jumped right into a complicated project without a pattern. I cut the pieces wrong to start, and then proceeded to sew them together wrong. As a quick fix, I decided to take the focus away from the stuff that hadn't worked so well (piecing and pressing) with something that I knew more about (hand embroidery and felt).

Details of what went wrong are in my original post here.

I tried to quilt this no less than six times, but didn't have much luck. I know now that it's because I was using really slippy high loft batting and bad quality thread. Eventually, I had to admit that I didn't like this quilt very much, and it has been sitting in my sewing room unfinished for six months. This week, I resolved to finish it.

I used the zippling design from this week's Free Motion Quilting Project exercise to finally quilt this properly. Then, I pulled out all of the really bad stitching in the ditch that was left over from my last attempt. The zippling was fun and looks good, definitely one I will use again. It's easier when there are no curves to worry about!

I also stitched around the turtles to give them more pop, and they did become really nice and puffy.

Apart from the zippling and the turtles, I still don't love this little quilt, but at least it's done! I plan to hang it on the wall of my sewing room as a reminder of how much I've improved.