I finished this quilted pillow cover today. There were so many problems with this! My machine was having some tension problems, and so on the underside of the quilting there were loops-- the stitches weren't taught and the bobbin thread knots were visible on top. I adjusted tension to no avail, and finally pulled off the throat plate of my machine. Lo and behold, there was practically a whole pillow stuffed in there (including in the bobbin mechanism)! After cleaning that out, my quilting looked perfect.
Somehow, when trimming, my quilted section was always 1/8" larger than I thought. I would trim meticulously in an attempt to make it square, only to measure and find an extra 1/8" in there (I felt like I was in the house on Ash Tree Lane).
Finally, after the whole thing was just about done, I noticed an inch long gash-- yes, gash-- in the front of the pillow. I have no idea how it got there; it could have been there, it could have gotten there during my aforementioned trimming session, who knows? At any rate, after I got over the urge to give up, I used tweezers to put some fusible interfacing in there, and I just ironed it down. Hopefully that will hold up.
The pillow has an envelope style back and is about 17" square. I used a King Tut variegated thread for the quilting, which is just straight lines spaced 1" apart-- not wonky, just good old evenly spaced lines. I did increase my stitch length to 4.0 for the quilting; longer stitches makes for nicer quilting!
It was very difficult to photograph this pillow. I have a red couch-- I'm talking about red. It was very difficult to get a decent photo, and even then I had to edit them quite a lot to make them acceptable. This was the only decent picture of the bunch, and it's terrible! I'm going to have to practice photographing items inside the house. Tips?
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