There was a crooked quilt...

I've put off trying to quilt this crooked family vintage quilt as long as I could.  It's fraught with ALL kinds of issues that until recently, I didn't feel confident in trying to quilt out.  With my new-ish HQ16, I'm feeling a little more confident but this quilt still left me troubled with it's crinkles and wrinkles and crooked-ness (which until now, most in my family had no idea WHY it was so gosh darned crooked and refused to lay flat):

It's almost 12" longer on the left side!

Somehow, the original creator left out 2 complete blocks on the right side which made the quilt almost twelve inches longer on the left side, problem solved ;-)  After trying to press it flat in spite of all it's twisted seams  - many which had been sewn by hand, I opted to stipple quilt it to try and stabilize and salvage as much as I could for posterity:

Was really wanting to try the Baptist Fan quilt pattern on this one, but... I don't think it would've worked out in the end ;-)  Once again, my stipple quilting came to the rescue.  I think I may have stipple quilted more quilts recently than most and I'm startin' to get pretty darn good at it!

And on top of everything else, I did what we are instructed/reminded over and over again to NEVER do - while trying to flatten out a few wrinkles on the top prior to quilting and not really paying attention to where I was stitching, I quilted right over my left index finger, broke a needle off 'inside' my finger and I had to pull it out w/needle nose pliers - now we know why we keep our longarm tools up close and personal!  

DISLAIMER:  I do NOT recommend doing what I did nor the remedy - it was practically a reflex action and I didn't really think about it until AFTER the fact - my friend, the nurse reminded me, I could've had permanent nerve/tendon/bone damage!  

Front hole

Back hole

the offensive needle w/tinge of my blood on tip

OK, I will NEVER do that again!!!  After much bandaging and applying antiseptic repeatedly, I was actually able to go back to quilting for awhile.  Speaking of which, need to get back to it...;-)

UPDATE:  got the Crooked Quilt completely quilted and it turned out much better than I ever thought it would:

Crooked Quilt coming off the frame - it actually lost a couple of inches of fullness on the left side after the stipple/quilting was finished ;-)

Time for binding!

Later,

~Deb