basting woes

Earlier this week I finished a new quilt top, a throw to go on the back of a sofa. I wanted to use all stash fabrics, and managed to do so, even using a great number of scraps, but just didn't have enough of any one deep red fabric for the outer border. Tim and I put the rails on my quilt frame, but put one of the ratchet mechanisms on backwards, leaving me with not enough tension to properly baste the quilt sandwich. 

This is what it looked like afterwards after having pulling out 1/2 of the stitches with a pair of scissors and tweezers. It took me much longer to undo my mistakes than it did to stitch them of course. I re pinned everything back on the frame on Sunday evening and finished basting it again yesterday. Now I am ready to start quilting a leaf and spiral round wreath on each Snowball block and a trailing vine with tiny leaves and spirals through the alternate blocks with some teardrops filling in the background. 

I really love free motion machine quilting, but I'm a little hesitant to try something radically different for fear of having to rip it all back out. I've done all the "unsewing" I plan on doing in the near future, hopefully my sewing will proceed forward rather than back in the next few weeks. The last time I machine quilted the lopsided sitting messed up my hip. With 3 races left in the season I have promised myself not to sew for too long at any one time so we shall see if I can get this quilt finished in time for Christmas.