Fixing the disaster

When I realized there were two blocks turned in my friend’s quilt as I was sewing on the binding my heart sank.  It was such a hard decision whether to just leave it or try to fix it.  I ended up fixing it.  It wasn’t hard, but was time consuming because I wanted the repair to be as inconspicuous as possible.  Here’s how I did it.
I started by carefully removing the quilting stitches from the two blocks and about 1 inch into the surrounding blocks.  Then I “unsewed” the blocks, turned them the right way and sewed them back together.  Because I didn’t want to remove any more quilting than absolutely necessary, I had to hand stitch a 1/2 inch area that I couldn’t turn.  You can see the stitches in the close-up but they are really almost invisible.

Remove the quilting stitches to the seam (this will make it easier to bury the knot), leaving tails long enough to knot.  Usually I would do this from the back of the quilt, not the front but the back was a solid gray fabric and I knew it would be easier to hide the repair in the print fabric on the front.

After the tails were tied in a knot I used a self-threading needle to bury the threads.  I love these needles for this purpose because they can be threaded with short tails.  You just slip the thread through a slot in the top of the needle.  If you can’t find them locally they are available from Amazon (who knew?) here.

Insert the tip of the needle a stitch length away from the stitching line and bring it up an inch or so away. 

Pull the thread through.

Then clip off the threads.

Re-quilt the area.  When you start, leave the tails on so you can tie them off and bury them like you did when you removed the stitching.

Repeat this process for every start and stop you have to do in the repair.  I had four.  In the end though, you couldn’t even tell on the solid backing fabric.

Like I said, it wasn’t really hard to do, it just took a lot of time.  My friend picked up the quilt on Monday and she was very happy with it.  It did turn out well, especially since she is a beginning quilter.  It is queen size and since my quilt stand broke I had to fold it over this drying rack to photograph it.  This is about 1/4 of the quilt.  You can see that from this though that the turned blocks would have really stood out.  And I really wonder why we didn’t catch it earlier???