Straight

At last month's modern quilting meeting, I took along my pink quilt top and asked the other quilters there how I should quilt my quilt. I had ideas, but I wasn't sure. By the end of the night I was pretty set on those ideas, with the encouragement of quilters who know much more than I do. I was going to do a swirly back-and-forth design in each block. It was going to be continuous and beautiful.

Unfortunately I'd neglected to factor in the following before I started quilting:
a) I hadn't practiced any free motion quilting in about 5 years
b) I'm really quite shit at free motion quilting, even with practice
c) I hadn't yet had the chance to do the online quilting course my husband had given me for my birthday.



Fortunately I worked out how shit I was at free motion quilting only one block in. Unpick, unpick, unpick, have a cup of tea.



Back to the drawing board. I brought out the big guns - my walking foot, a ruler and a pencil.



I really do love quilting straight lines. They can transform a quilt into something dramatic and clever. Or very simple. I think anyone who poo-poos straight line quilting can bite me. No, really they can.

[Delete rant about competitiveness in the quilting world and traditional vs modern and who put the 'vs' in there anyway and what the hell were they thinking?]

[Insert nice statement about joy and warmth and rainbows and puppy dogs and lovely people]

I quilted line after line, fuelled by Haighs chocolate caramels (thanks to my dealer) and grunge music on the stereo. I quilted and quilted and eventually got about halfway and decided enough was enough.



I'll work on it some more tomorrow.