Diamond Sawtooth Quilt

The following Diamond Sawtooth Quilt is the last in a series of stunning Red & White Quilts I have quilted for Linda Collins of Quilts in the Barn.  This quilt too will feature in the upcoming Quilts in the Barn Exhibition as detailed in my previous post.  As usual, Linda's piecing was incredibly accurate - on this occasion she had paper pieced the half-square triangles resulting in perfect points.

Linda gave me the freedom to quilt as desired, as long as it included feathers.  I spent quite some time designing the quilting elements, using the Divide and Design concepts outlined in Lisa Calle's DVD.  Each triangle was divided and the same element quilted into each triangle either once, twice or four times depending on the size of the triangle.

The border was quilted with a simple undulating feather with straight lines.  The straight lines were quilted using one of the Quilter's Groove Rulers which made the spacing of the lines straightforward.

All was going really well until I decided to remove some of my blue dividing lines with a spray of water.  Being a red and white quilt, I was being conscious of the possibility of bleeding.  I had used the blue wash out pen on the white fabric only and had used chalk on the red.  You can imagine my horror when on spraying the white fabric, being careful to avoid any red fabric, a pink stain appeared - the backing fabric had bled into the top fabric.  At 11pm on a Saturday evening, I took to the computer googling madly for solutions to this problem - I did take some comfort from other quilters who had experienced the same problem.  After a restless night, I rose early to finish quilting the quilt and visited the supermarket to buy some Colour Catchers.  I consulted Linda who confirmed that none of the fabrics had been pre-washed.  We agreed that I would was the quilt, hopefully rinsing out all the excess dye including the bleeding which had occurred.

I tested some off-cuts of the backing fabric in some warm water in the bath - it turned pink!  Eventually, the quilt went in with a whole packet of  Colour Catchers.  Again, the water turned pink.  After a second and third rinsing, all the colour appeared to be gone and fortunately, the stain had washed out as well.  I am not sure how the Colour Catchers work, but they do appear to be effective - each of the sheets started out white.