Recovery

OxyClean, I think I love you. 

Yesterday I washed a quilt - and this is what came out of the dryer. I was so upset.  I spent hours on this quilt, working out the sizes for all the star points.  Cutting and piecing and making sure it lay flat.  Plus, it's the most intricate quilting design I've ever attempted.  And it was ruined on the first washing.

I didn't know what to do, but I headed out to the grocery store to scour the laundry aisle.  I was hoping to find colour catchers, as I've heard people have good luck with those.  But apparently none of the grocers around here carry them.  And Amazon won't ship them to my (Canadian) address.   So in desperation I picked up some Oxy Clean, and decided to try that.  I figured it couldn't hurt, given the state of the poor quilt.  I put the quilt through twice.  First in cold water with Oxy Clean and my detergent. It seemed to have helped a lot, although I could still see some bleeding.  So I took a deep breath, and washed it again - this time in warm water, which is recommended on the Oxy Clean packaging.

It was really hard to tell, while the quilt was wet (because all the seam allowances looked like they bled through the white, when it was soaking wet).  But I figured it was the best I was going to get, and I tossed the quilt back into the dryer.  And low and behold, this is what came out!

It's not perfect.  I can still see that the whites are a bit bluer than they should be.  But there are no more big blue stains across the quilt.  I am so happy!

Here is the finished quilt, pre-washing.  This was a design of my own, and something I'd always wanted to try out.  I gave up early on figuring exact sizes for all the star points, and ended up with a "cut, sew, trim" method which worked out well.

And a close up of some of the quilting, post washing.  I picked a quilting design I found online, and adjusted it slightly to handle the graduated sizes of the white squares.  The original shape when here.  One size down, I pulled the center bit only.  And one size up, I put 4 of these together to make a larger square.

I echo quilted in the blue areas, to highlight the star points.  And did a diagonal cross-hatch in the diamond border.  This is one of my more intricate quilting patterns - both in the design and in the quilting.  I'm very glad I was able to recover it, after the washing disaster last night.

I'm linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it up Friday today.  Drop by see all the fabulous projects.