Did I Bite Off More Than I Can Chew??

I'm not sure!

I debated and debated about having Kathy O. long arm quilt my Modern Building Blocks quilt top.  I knew she could fly through it and the stitching would be perfection, but in the end I decided I should tackle it myself, especially since it's simply straight line quilting with my walking foot.  And, I plan to enter it in our local fair in August and really wanted to be able to say that I pieced and machine quilted it myself.

I'm stitching the rows 1/2" apart.

I've stitched four rows so far - this is going to take me 4.EVER!

(Kathy, I guess it's too late for you to bail me out????)

I'm not 100% happy with my stitching, so I may rip out those first four rows....  

I'm using Hobbs 80/20 batting; it's a bit thicker than the Warm & White/Natural that I often use, so I think I need to adjust the foot pressure so there isn't as much drag.  Since this is such a big quilt (84x96!), there's a bit of distortion by the time I got to the bottom of the quilt.  This is the biggest quilt I've done the straight line stitching on; I've never had any issues with smaller quilts.

I've been keeping a card file for each machine quilting scenario I've done (both FMQ and walking foot), noting the batting, thread, needle, stitch length, and foot pressure.   It gives me a good starting point every time I tackle a new project.

As you can see, this is one BIG quilt - much bigger and I wouldn't have been able to baste it on my kitchen floor!