Project Progress: Liberated Alphabet Quilt

It was back in February 2010 that the Block Lotto (now here) had Liberated Patchwork Letters as that month's block.  I did a set of letters in pink to have a go here, but didn't do any more in the right colours at the time and didn't enter that month.  I added sashing then took a photo of them on my board, then put them in a box, waiting to be sewn together.  Another unfinished project....

Raw State

Then last month I finally bought myself a quarter inch foot with guide for my Bernina, not from Bernina themselves in Wales, because as it turns out the local sewing shop in Whitley Bay has cheaper postage (excellent! one day I need to go to Whitley Bay and visit their shop, it looks interesting, but it's about 30 miles and petrol costs are high so it'll have to wait until I've got other reasons to go too).

All Sewn Together!

And how amazing is a quarter inch foot? Oh yes, well worth the money.  So now the quilt is all sewn together, with two more crumb blocks, and a fairly narrow border strip having been added.  Not only that, but also with batting and a backing made up of various sized leftover pieces from the same set of self-dyed fabric, and all tacked together with huge stitches in the middle of my sashing.

With hindsight, I should have paid more attention and centred the letters within the white background BEFORE adding the sashing, getting rid of the excess fabric (or at least restashing it and now I can't find it again) and then having to accept it and just sew it all together.  It's particularly evident with the D which has no white on two sides and is a very wide letter, but it's an issue with lots of the letters.  Perhaps if I'd put the crumb blocks differently, it wouldn't have been so obvious.  Never mind, I've learnt a lot with that mistake! So I thought I'd move on, trim them all to the exact size (another thing I've learnt to do before sewing it all together) and get it quilted. By hand.

The Back

Then I got stuck.  I tried to handquilt 'in the ditch' thinking I'd do this along the bottom of each letter horizontally then vertically - just a simple hand quilted grid following the sashing.  But all those random seams, some of which are quite thick, make it really hard!

Handquilted along top of Z

It's not that hard to sew evenly along the main seam at the front (I've done a full horizontal from W to Z, and half from T to Z).  But there's something about my stitching angle and my needle can go HORRIBLY wrong through the layers, requiring quite a bit of ripping out & redoing, and even now it's not great....

What I'd like to achieve is even stitches in a straight line on both sides.  But despite never having had the problem before (albeit on plain cloth), I don't seem to be able to get it right (as clearly seen above).  Maybe I should have ironed the creases out of the backing too, but I'm going to wash it after it's made up, so hopefully it won't matter.

Any tips?  Should I be using a hoop? I do own some of that paper quilting tape that you pin down for even stitches, but it's smaller stitches than I want to use and won't help with the angles? 

Should I just give up & machine it with a meander or a straight stitch?  

HELP!!!!  All advice gratefully received!

This is why for the first time in ages, I'm posting my Design Wall on Judy Laquidara's blog, I KNOW you will know where I'm going wrong, and hopefully you'll tell me how to put it right....

Lois

TootHillMedley