Thank you

A huge thank you to everyone who has responded to my recent cries for help. I've had lots of suggestions for my butterfly quilt and downloaded loads of patterns. I've also found a pattern in a magazine, so I've got loads of inspiration to choose from.

And thank you also to all the suggestions about my quilting. Those of you who said it would look better after it was washed were quite right, the puckers are still there but not so obvious now amongst all the other crinkles. A couple of people suggested putting some applique patches over the worst of the creases, and I'm certainly going to have a try at that in the next day or so. I've never tried using basting spray but I'll try and get hold of some and try that next time, and I also need to buy some more pins. I think that perhaps I hadn't put enough pins in so that the fabric wasn't well stretched. I was using a walking foot, but in a way that made it worse as it's harder to ease fabric to fit.

I think Angela hit the nail on the head though. She said "I seem to have the most problems with puckers when I quilt in one area and then come back to it again from a different direction. So I try to work in sections and finish every thing off before moving on. The crossing seams seem to cause problems, especially when you keep coming up on them from different directions. It looks like that might be what happened in your quilt. The stretchiness of the bias versus the straight of grain probably caused things to shift differently as you moved back and forth."

Aren't bloggers wonderful?

And this is nothing to do with sewing, but I thought you might like to see a photograph of an orchid that I was given for a Christmas present. It hasn't stopped flowering since then, and now has six beautiful blooms on it. I think this is its last flush though, so need to look up what to do with it after it finishes flowering.