I had been toying with the idea of leaving the trusses unquilted (apart from the stitching around the edges to prevent bits becoming dislodged).  I REALLY want to finish this quilt soon!

But I found an alarming development of wobbles and woofs in the quilt (due to uneven density of quiling) and I feared no amount of ironing would fix it.  So the decision is made for me.

And I'm so happy it was.  It seems impossible for me to capture with my late night photography, but I have been able to really accentuate the truss directions.  For the first time in the quilting phase of this piece I am pleased with the direction I've chosen to take.

So, I'm zooming along feeling pretty good about stuff and my thread starts shredding and breaking and generally being a pain.  So I inspect my (recently changed needle) and find that there is a nasty coating up the shaft... so I change to a new needle, and the shredding continues and I see that this new needle has the gunky stuff too.

So I changed from a microtex to a quilting needle to see if the larger eye would make a difference to the shredding (I normally don't like them, too fat), and the same thing happens.I tried sewing slower and it seemed to fix the problem.  So I'm now wondering if Vliesofix has a tendency of gumming up needles.  Any Australians have this problem before? I never have and I'm sure I've quilted faster than this before.

Other technical problems which have become apparent:

• The gummy needles have dragged tiny fibre filaments from the batting (Matilda's Own wool/poly).  In certain light this is visible against the dark blue.
• My beloved bobbin thread is white... Sometimes I get some of it coming up to the top of the quilt, like when I do a sharp corner GRRR!   I have a cunning plan though.  I am not above using a permanent fabric marker to mask them out.   There isn't a lot of it, but it does contrast with the dark blue.  In future I'll use a matching bobbin thread - lesson learned.

Quilting has commenced on the trusses.