I don't know about my biggest mistake, there were so many but the most recent was while cutting threads, I clipped a small hole in the back of a quilt I am working on and didn't mark it immediately - now I can't find it! driving me nuts - same quilt set one square backwards but caught the error and it was near a corner -

OOOOH NOOOOOOOOO! Was it save-able???!!! I have nightmares about doing something like that, ever since I sprayed de-tangler in my hair instead of hair spray right before going to a wedding (at least it wasn't glue). As for quilting, I make so many mistakes it's not even worth trying to list them all.

Does anyone else have the perverse tendency to keep going even after you get the feeling that there is something wrong with the way you're doing whatever it is? My current project is a scrape quilt, and I started thinking it was ugly by the time I made 4 blocks. Now I have 25 ugly blocks and I seem to be headed toward the full 49, with no relief in sight. I guess we need an ugly quilt for the cats to shed on.

Great save! I like what you ended up with!

Oh my goodness! I'm sorry, but I had to sit back and laugh at this one. I hope your machine is ok. Gina

Mistakes add charm to a home made quilt....that's what I'm going with..

...and when all else fails, try, try again. So I did, lol. Third time is the charm, lots of hard work but worth it.

I Love this topic!! I have made too many to list but here are a few. I was making a Christmas tree quilt with rows of trees. I was piecing this in rows and you guessed it, I inverted one of the rows so the bows went the wrong direction. I made a quilt with chinese lanterns and half of them had the center pieces reversed so they looked like wings. Split one of those panels of blocks apart to put some sashing between them to make the quilt bigger and did not leave a seam allowance when I cut them apart (and the panel was so old I could not replace it). I had 2 panels exctly alike that I was going to slice apart and but back together in an interesting way and I had the bottom panel turned at right angles.

We are all human -- we just have to laugh at the mistakes and go on from there.

I was trying to hurry and finish a surprise quilt for my daughter who was visiting from out of state for Christmas. All I had left was the binding. Had it all pieced together, folded in half and pressed. Then when I pinned it on, I pinned it unfolded. And sewed it. And I knew it wasn't right but couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. Picked it all out, did it again, same way, it was horrible. I hadn't done a whole lot of quilts, but surely should have known better, but was tired and it was late. I made it look as good as I could under the circumstances, but it was awful.And then I machine zigzagged the edge down, which was just worse. She was thrilled with it, and didn't know there was anything wrong (thank goodness for total ignorance on the part of my family members as to what a GOOD quilt job looks like!!!).

I always tell my husband, "If you don't do anything, you don't make mistakes."

Nothing like doing something wrong/the hard way to learn how NOT to do something.

I am almost an expert on how NOT to do many things.

One of the reasons I am so in favor of washing fabrics before cutting is because of some color bleeding and shrinkage issues that I've encountered.

It is so much easier to just get that step out of the way than to try to undo the damage later.