When one thing goes wrong, they all go wrong (long)

I've been working on a large, weird piece in fits and starts for about a month now.  The background fabric, backing and binding all came from a very large piece of hand dyed fabric, intentionally made for the vision I had.  I wanted to make faint shapes of brain cells on this background, and finally decided to mark them out, and use Caron d"Arche pastels to create soft colour. Went out, drove almost all the way across town,  and bought the pastels.  I have never used them, but have used both oil and chalk pastels before, on fabric.  No big deal, right?  Got home and found out that I had bought wax pastels and had no idea how to use them at all.  Very expensive crayons. So hit he internet. Not much help.  Asked friends.  The only suggestion was to paint the areas I wanted to use them on with fabric medium before suing the crayons.  Well, once that was done I was committed to the process, but I sure don't recommend it.  The areas with the fabric medium finished much darker than areas without it.  So instead of faint brain cells I had obvious brain cells.

For the first time in my life, I wanted to put words on a quilt, so FMQ'd 11 words between the brain cells, all representing some sort of negative thought. These appear to be just part of the quilting, unless you look very closely.

Next was the background quilting--matchstick quilting--with thread breaks every time the line went over a brain cell, or over any of the lines coming off the brain cells representing the axons,  whatever the name is for the other time of lines joining the cells, as well as over the words.  The process took almost a month of working 2-3 hours almost every day.This what I ended up with.

Next was to make oval shaped appliques,  containing  positive words, to be scattered over the  quilted background.  I prepared these with my hand-dandy Appliquik tools, using a heavier than normal fusible interfacing to support the machine stitching I would use to crate the words.  Got all the words marked and started to stitch.  

 The seam allowance that had been glued to the back of the oval refused to play nicely with the edges of my slider in the area of hole used to allow the needle to go up and down.

The struggle continued for awhile, as interfacing has never worked well against the bed of the machine, but finally I got rid of the slider.

Next problem with  stitching the words was that the heavier interfacing I had used as a stabilizer didn't work.  Every one of the ovals appliques need to be blocked.  That meant getting them wet, but I had marked with a water-erasable pen, so that was part of the job anyway.  Then the moisture softened the fabric glue holding the seam allowance in place.  A bit of a panic, but it got dealt with. Here they are with three still to go.

 Hopefully these  can be stitched to the background tomorrow.  I will be s-o-o-o glad to see the end of this project!