I have read every entry of thiis thread and I am in awe of your professionalism and good customer service! Best wishes.

Your quilt looks fantastic in the picture. Refund her money and move on. Don't accept work from this customer again. Life is too short to get mired down into these kinds of things. You won't get anything out of this one, but a lesson in doing business with someone who is hard to please.

You have handled this matter with grace and professionalism. I firmly believe that the other quilt shop is merely trying to solicit business. Removing all of the stitching on this quilt would give disastrous results. I think the other quilt shop personnel (or owner-I don't know) behaved in a very unprofessional manner. I am a relative newbie, or as I call myself, a "rank amateur" and I would never criticize anyone's long arm quilting because of that inexperience. And, I don't think it reflects very well on the other quilt shop either. Look Out for the Quilt Police!

Profannie, I also LAQ and have made memory quilts (both t-shirts and others using a variety of fabrics). I have to say that the mixing of fabrics can be a real bear when it comes to getting a quilt that looks awesome--they just don't play well together sometimes! I find that as a LAQ I sometimes have to lose $$ on the project so keep my quilting reputation intact when I run into problems--I had a marker that I could not remove, finally did, but had to wash the quilt (something I never do to another person's quilts!) so that baby quilt was done for free--lesson learned with that marker! Recently I had a new roll of bat that supposily had more fiber so should quilt up little puffier, which is what my customer wanted. Well, it didn't! So I gave her a 50% discount on the bat--she was a first time customer so I may/may not get more quilts from her. But I wanted her to know that I recognized a problem and wanted to make it right. I guess maybe where I'm going with this is that I would have requested she mail it back and fix it myself, rather than to have her take it to a LQS that I was unfamiliar with to critique & fix. I think as a business owner we sometimes need to be ready to take a $$ loss in order to be successful.

also, you make it sound like you are not charging a reasonable rate for your work as a form of practice--I would definitely stop doing that! It will encourage your customers to think that your work is not really good--and that is a pretty quilt, a tough pattern and you did a nice job!

I am sorry for your troubles. The quilt itself...and the fabrics are full of many memories....I am not sure if you could ever make that "right" for any customer...Some Quilts are mostly memories...and if you are not the person who had those memories...I don't think you would ever get them right. You do the best you can...