Ok, I just finished squaring up my knight quilt that I have spent more than two years making. Granted, it was made mostly while I was working and the time I spent on it was occasional, but still, I have a lot of hours in this quilt.
I discovered to my dismay that there is a fairly substantial wave at the bottom of my quilt.
I know why these things occur...differences of quilting densities (needed to make the textures right in this landscape quilt), stretching during construction (likely), and since this is a landscape quilt with lots of odd shaped pieces, the piecing may be partly at fault (quite likely)...or all of the above (why didn't I see this back before I quilted it....sigh. This quilt has been one problem after another and I will be glad to finish it. Funny how some quilts just flow together nicely and others fight you the whole way.
Perhaps it's the knight...he is clearly a fighter.
Nevertheless, I have a wave and am not going to be able to go back, frog, and remake that part of the quilt...it's too far along...it's basically finished and heavily quilted! So I have tried steam...it stayed flat for a few minutes until I moved the quilt, and then popped right back up. I am currently trying wetting down that part of the quilt...I didn't want to wash this quilt for a wide variety of reasons related to the materials and methods used in making it. I have now got it drying after squashing it down with a flat weight. You can see the photos in my personal blog here:
http://blog.bjfabricartist.com/
I hope it won't pop right back up the second i lift it from the table. I tried some stay tape that is designed to prevent stretching in shoulder seams, etc, but it didn't make any difference
and it seemed it might get in the way of the binding, so I took it off.
I may try taping it with blue painters tape to see if I can hold it together until I can put in some stay stitching. If you have any other ideas how I might fix this, I'd love to hear them. I want to enter this quilt into the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival. Send your good wishes wafting my way.