I just finished quilting all ~135 diamonds (I haven’t actually counted them). It took me four days to stitch/embroider all the diamonds – somewhere in the vicinity of 16 hours.

Yesterday I learned two new things.

First – I use the Precise Positioning feature on my Pfaff Icon embroidery machine – however, in all these years I’ve been quilting my quilts I’ve used the left/right up/down feature but except when I was learning what Precise Positioning could do, I have never used the rotate feature! This set of diamonds and positioning a design within each block required I also rotate the design slightly to make sure the end of the design finished in the right position.

Second – When I’m quilting, I bring the bottom thread to the top before I start stitching. Sometimes when the machine starts the top thread gets pulled beneath the quilt sandwich, often leaving a bit of a bird’s nest below. Yesterday, I found out why that was happening! I discovered when I bring the bottom thread to the top, I have to make sure the needle position is rotated past the highest point. If I’m careful about that, my top thread stays where it is.

There are lots of things you can’t tell from the photo which looks a lot busier than the quilt does “in person”. You can’t see that I change thread for each block to minimize the impact of the quilting. You can’t see that I’ve embedded all thread ends from the start and stop of each embroidery. You do see the overall effect of the precise positioning of each quilting embroidery.

I still have the edge half-diamonds at the top and bottom to quilt, as well as the triangles along each side. I’ll get to that tomorrow; it won’t take long. Then, as I did on the Diamonds II quilt, I will stitch in the ditch over the entire quilt to give definition to each diamond/cube.

Still lots of work to do here.