I'm still working on my first quilt, which has been in progress for oh, six months or so now. :) Unfortunately, work gets in the way of my hobbies. I had originally planned to machine quilt because I wanted to get the quilt finished before the last of this year's Fool's Gold romances came out, since I got the pattern on the Fool's Gold website.

I quilted one straight line the vertical length of the quilt and one horizontal... and I hated it. I hated having the quilt all bunched up in the machine, and trying to turn the quilt was a nightmare. Last night, I ripped out those two lines of thread, and now I'm ready to start hand-quilting.

My plan is to quilt inside the colored triangles with white thread. Then I would like to quilt a heart on each of the red-and-white nine-patch blocks. I'm also going to do hearts along the all-white border. In the second picture, if you look closely at the individual block, you can see the pink heart I drew on the nine-patch.

My question is... Is there any danger in using red thread on white fabric? When I wash it, I'll use a color catcher, but will it bleed anyway? There's no way to prewash the thread. :) (At least, not that I've heard of... and I can't imagine re-spooling it. LOL

I do a lot of redwork with red thread. I've used Retayne when it's completed - seems to work fine. No bleeding as yet!
Love your quilt.
Good luck, Karen

No advice on thread use
but, love your quilt

As long as you are using quilting thread or sewing thread and not embroidery floss I wouldn't worry about it.

Yes, it is quilting thread. Does that mean that it doesn't bleed? (...she asked hopefully)

Thank you! I'm anxious to get this one finished because I want to get started on the next one. This is a lap-size quilt. The next one is going to be for our king bed. The pattern is for a queen, so I need to figure out how to make it larger before I start.

Beautiful quilt! I can't advise you on the red thread, but want to ask if you prewashed the red fabric in the quilt? It looks like it might be a batik. The combination of red and batik is almost a recipe for disaster if you haven't prewashed. If you didn't, please be very careful and use retayne or you may end up with pink background instead of white!

Yes, I did prewash all the fabrics. The red is not batik, but even so, I felt like any red fabric next to that white would be a recipe for disaster. Maybe I should put two color catchers in there the first time I wash the whole thing!

Beautiful quilt! Post pics when completed!

Thank you! I will. I felt like such a rebel because the designer said in the quilt pattern that I should use gold for the nine-patch blocks and violets for all the triangles. I decided to use red for the nine-patch (to represent the heart in the Fool's Gold logo) and matched the colors of the triangles to the Fool's Gold book covers... sort of. Definitely not an exact match, but lots of bright, happy colors.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. I kind of think maybe the white is too white... but I don't want it to turn pink, for sure!