another happy ending quilt mishap

My daughter #2 loves purple not to the point of being a "must have everything purple fanatic", but she is geared towards purple.  Anyway in high school she picked out the kaleidescope pattern as the quilt that she wanted.  I started collecting and gathering fabrics buyimg purples in every quilt/fabric store I visited.  This went on for a couple of years I think.  Then  I started cutting, until that point I hadn't really thought about the red purples, pinky purpls and blue purples of which I had LOTS.   And I cut and I cut, then cut some more.  I started assembling a few blocks.  We threw them up on the diesgn wall and she decided for the most part we should stick with mostly the bluer purples and less of the red violet shades. So I sewd and sewed pieces together.  When I quit I had more than enough for one quilt, and still had LOTS of pieces left, I have since then made a second one (it was machine quilted) and have enough pieces for a third and maybe a fourth..(got a little carried away cutting)

anyway that part is not the mishap.........................................

This is the front of her quilt keep reading.............

Bethie's quilt above is the first and last big quilt that I tried to quilt by hand.  I had done baby quilts before that and since then with any major screw ups................. but because this quilt was special, of course things would get weird..    I do not have a reglar quilting frame so I used a very large oval floor hoop off of the stand, in my lap. I had basted it with very large basting stitches, removing them as I went along,  I sarted in the center and then worked around the center moving out going around in a bigger circle each time.   Somwhere about 1/4 of the way from the outside edge on one of the rounds when I was coming up to join where the circle started, all off of a sudden I realized that at one point or another I had pulled the fabric underneath waaaaayyy more than the top.  I was HORRIFED............................I had way more top than I had backing.  Now I don't even :"unsew" if I can help it, I was NOT going to unquilt it,,,,,nor would I have even known where to start unquilting  I put it aside and just looked at it for days, weeks, months...............WHAT was I going to do, I knew what had to be done.................but would I do it.......................one day I decided to quilt everything else but that area about 10" x 20".  when I got done with the rest of the quilting, I did the only thing I knew to do.........................

flipped it over, picked up my scissors, just the backing layer of fabric and sliced it open.  I laid it out flat, rebasted and then quilted it as if there was backing fabric there, the batting stretched enough it was okay. Now I had this large gap on the back going from nothing to almost 3 inches wide.   Now I could have sewn a piece of fabric over the gap but at the time I was enjoying needleturn applique and decided to applique flowers over the gap, and because of the unusual place decided to sprinkle lots of flowers all over the quilt.  swooping here and there..........hiding the fact that there was a problem on the back, lol!    The hole if you really want to know where it is is underpart of the swoop at the left in the middle.  (I think anyway......it's been awhile.) 

A happy ending quilt mishap................She now has a 2 sided quilt, which makes it even more special than the original idea because she has a funny story to go with it,  Only bad thing was she was excited because she thought her quilt was about done..............took me another year more to finish it.  It was a bad time too my son had been in a near fatal car accident.  He suffered a TBI(traumatic brain injury) was in a  coma for 22 days and had to relearn everyrhing.  He'll never be the same but he is who he is and can do most things.  He and his dad just don't get the fact that he can't drive anymore and a few other things but is okay.  According to the label I began her quilt(began collecting fabrics a couple of yearsbefire that) in 2001 and finished it in 2003.  Here are some shots of the backside............sorry about the quality of the photos, best I could find.

up next. a Fourth of July freebie...........check back later. cyndi