Practice makes... well, hopefully at least better.

I planned on quilting Brenna's quilt by hand... which would take approximately twelve and a half years.

But then I came across this and this.  So fabulous.

And I also love her free motion quilting.  Which is faster.  And hard.  So I started looking for directions, tips and tricks.  I found directions, but as for tricks... well, most everything I read said practice.  Practice, practice, practice.  I hope no one paid money for that advice.

So I have been practicing.  Since good quilting fabric is expensive, I went to my handy local Giant Discount Establishment and bought a couple yards of cheap fabric.  But even then, batting was still more expensive than I wanted to pay for practice materials.  So upon consideration of the materials at hand (meaning, spread across the floor of various closets) I decided to quilt one of the "mess" towels we keep around for cleaning up the plentiful spills around here.  Brilliant, right?  Well, sort of.  Not really smooth, and TONS of lint, but it's doing the job.

Free motion quilting is basically using your sewing machine needle to draw pictures on the fabric.  But instead of moving the pen, you move the paper.  So the key is to keep the foot pedal at a steady pace, while also moving this huge, heavy quilt around under the needle... and make it look nice.

 

I divided the quilt sandwich into squares, and I'm practicing a different style in each.

I love spirals.  And I suck at them. You can see here how moving the fabric and the pedal at the wrong speeds really impacts stitch length.  It's totally like learning to drive a car again :).  One of the tips that I keep coming across is "don't look right in front of the needle.  Look where you want it to go."  I think I heard that a time or twenty when I was learning to drive!

I think this is the one I'll use on Brenna's quilt.

How cute are these guys?

This one is Nathan's favorite.

I'm not ready to start on the quilt yet... I really want to get my stitch lengths under control, but I think I might be able to start next week sometime.  Yay!