An Adventure

Another reason I started my blog now was to document an upcoming adventure. For the first twenty-some years of my quilting, I pieced by machine and quilted by hand. And quilted by hand. And quilted by hand. It was quite lovely, and at the time, I was fine with it. It was what I knew, what I liked, what I wanted to do. But even I would confess that it took a lot of time to hand quilt. I saw others move on to new projects, and I would still be hand quilting away.

There came a time, not so long ago, when I decided I wanted to try machine quilting. Pretty much so I could make more quilts! There were more fabrics and more patterns to try! So last year, I started dabbling with machine quilting. I screwed on my walking foot and gave it a go. Unfortunately, my treasured, 30-year-old sewing machine just wasn’t quite up to it. After a bit, I gave in and bought a new machine, with fancy buttons, a bigger throat, and feed-dogs that dropped. Aha. I could straight-line quilt successfully. My first project was a table runner, and I went on to many table runners and could easily manage up to lap-size quilts. Step 1 accomplished.





It’s time for Step 2. So this Saturday, I am taking a machine quilting class at The Quilting Loft. It is being taught by Darlene Girton, who has quilted several quilts for me. The class description promises I will ‘(learn) the basics of starting and stopping stitch lines, gain confidence in stitch-in-the-ditch quilting with a walking foot, and (get) an introduction to free motion quilting.’ I also hope the class covers stippling techniques too. I’ll let you know how it goes.