All's well that ends well....eventually!

Ms MacQuilt, this one is for you!  This is one of those "oh no" moments that invariably come in the process of making quilts.

Setting the stage:  Ms MacQuilt, who generously shares her Gammill with Ms Mom22smartchix and me, was at a conference and needed a baby quilt completed for a colleague's new little one.  She had been collecting black/white and red batiks for this cute little quilt.  Ms Chix offered to quilt it and I was over for moral support and comic relief.

All was going swimmingly and we were merrily quilting along and visiting.  Piece of cake, right?  It's a baby quilt and should take less than an hour, right?  Yep --- until we rolled the quilt and found the tear that you see here!  Somehow the needle had torn the batik on the back and we had an "L shaped" tear in the lower half of the backing.  We couldn't believe our eyes!  What do we do?  Cry?  Curse?  We couldn't ignore it and it was way too big for some of the tricks that cover up little boo-boos when you're longarming.  I don't think I've ever felt as heartsick when I was working on a quilt as that moment.

The solution?  After a lot of discussion, appliqué over that tear (which was about 2.5" at its longest) seemed to be the only solution.  To this day, I'm not sure what else we could have done -- short of starting over and we seriously considered that.  Ms MacQuilt was brought in the loop and gave us carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to do .... how's that for trust!  The quilt was bound and presented to the new mom and no one was any the wiser!

Have you ever had a catastrophe while quilting and how did you handle it?  I'd be curious if anyone has  suggestions for what we could have done differently here?  I'm pretty sure it sucked up one of my 'nine lives'!

I hope you're finding time to piece and quilt -- error free!  Jan