Sunrise Over Nanning - Something's Wrong

Something is terribly wrong, and now is not the time to discover it! Two things - I thought it would be great to quilt around the letters in a contrasting thread in free-motion. I've done about 4 complete characters and I hate it. What's worse, some of the stitches are so close together that I need a magnifying glass to pull them. I'm debating on whether to pull out all the stitching and start over with matching threads instead... and decide to do it. Better to do it now than hate it when it's too late to do anything about it.

However, the absolutely worst thing to have happen - and the worst time to discover it - is that I have actually appliqued one block with the characters in the wrong order, and this I have discovered after my brilliant decision to redo the stitching around it. My mistake is not only sewn in - but quilted in.

It doesn't matter that the recipient nor her family read Chinese... I don't read it either, but I know it's wrong simply from the research I've done & the printouts I have of the translated words. Somehow I have to remove this block from the quilt AND replace it with a correct one, without anyone knowing the wiser.

Welcome to Quilt Restoration 101.

First, I have to make an identical block, with the letters in the correct place. Then, I have to pull out the quilting stitches, and the stitches that attach it to the surrounding blocks.

I neglected to take a picture of the "hole" left behind by removing the block. I then inserted the replacement block, and use a monofilament thread to quilt very close to the edge of the surrounding blocks to reattach the block. This repair was so nearly invisible that I couldn't even tell that I'd done it - even upon close inspection of the quilt.

*Phew*. Now I can get back to quilting instead of unquilting.