Life Lessons From Quilting

I'm learning some really important life lessons from my quilting. One of them is do it anyway. I'm anything but a good machine quilter. I'm controlling the direction the stitches take better, but the size of the stitches is irregular and some of them are almost at the toe catcher level. But I'm doing it anyway.

Another thing I'm learning to do is practice. All of the machine quilting teachers keep saying "practice, practice, practice". I'm practicing new designs on paper because "if you can draw it, you can stitch it" and pretty obviously if you can't draw the design with a pencil on paper you are never going to be able to stitch it.

The white cloth with the safety pins is the current practice sandwich. 

You can see my first feather on it, and a bunch of other designs I was just trying out as well.


Another thing all of the teachers are saying is that before you start quilting at any session, you need to spend some time warming up on a practice piece. So you can see my first attempt at some of the designs that are going on the cross quilt. And some that will never go there because I never quite figured them out. Or at least not yet.

The first half of the Cross Quilt is stitched. I'm doing some designs that are curvy and some that are supposed to be more straight.

I don't know if I will ever display this quilt on my wall. But there is no question that doing it is teaching me a lot of stuff. And not just about quilting.