I have been a hand piecer & hand quilter of bed quilts for a long time. Most of my quilts I consider showworthy & pieces of art because of the handwork - I think handwork is precise & it was the whole point to aim for precision, accuracy, tiny stitches, a coherent finished quilt, etc. I haven't completed hundreds of quilts either, but have made many, many special ones for my kids, when little, as they've become adults w/their own homes, g'kids, & many baby quilts, wedding quilts, graduation quilts, & other special occasion quilts for close family members & friends... But in the end they are to be used & loved for what they are - Bed quilts! (And I have tended towards old fashioned patterns w/lots of small pieces using homemade templates & scissors, one 5x24 gridded ruler & an Olfa cutter & small mat.
I don't go to a lot of shows mostly because we are so rural - but also because the last few I have traveled to, I was really disappointed at the lack of handwork. To me that is what quilting was all about. It's probably the old fashioned idea that it's something you do yourself from start to finish, most of the time w/what you have on hand - and it's not supposed to be a "hobby" that costs lots of money. To me what I see at shows is a lot of quilts that are definitely beautiful, but machine pieced & many times machine appliqued as well, or one of the many "quick methods" of applique anymore (in my day it was all needle turn, painstakingly slow hand work) & most crediting someone else w/the machine quilting - plus the whole new category of the art quilts that are thread encrusted, basically machine embroidery taking over the quilt tops. And totally done w/specifically bought "quality" quilting cottons that are way overpriced. It seems a lot of piecers don't like the whole quilting process from beginning to end. They just enjoy the process of piecing tops, lots of tops, & turn out lots of finished quilts as long as someone else is doing the quilting like it's not part of the process... It's become quite a business providing pre-packaged pattern kits or already matched up fabrics enuf to do an entire quilt - or the major motifs anyway, all the way thru someone else to quilt it! I'm not there... (if you couldn't tell...:)
Don't know if I explained that real clearly, but with that in mind...
I am also of an age where if I want to continue to quilt & go thru the process myself, I have to learn machine quilting & take advantage of the shortcuts w/machine piecing as I've been developing arthritis in my hands and will be lucky to finish off the last couple special quilts I've had in the works for years that I plan to quilt by hand. I tried my first baby quilt on the machine & came to the realization that I don't think I'd enjoy wrestling a king sized quilt thru the throat of my little White Jeans Machine. This year I have spent a lot of time on then internet researching & this summer I have purchased a short arm machine on a frame (thru Craigslist). Also found en excellent deal on a Juki TL98Q so I'm piecing w/that now & am having fun learning the basic edge to edge quilting on donation charity quilts, w/pantographs for now til I get comfortable w/free motioning without following the lines. I am at the very beginning of the very long learning curve - tho my quilting ladies of the guild I belong to are quite impressed w/the results & ready to hire me on to "do" their stacks of tops as soon as I feel like I'm ready to do that kind of work. Which really wasn't the point of learning this...
At this point, I'm putting together a couple machine pieced quilts solely for the purpose of practicing on the "longarm". Block of the months, Mystery quilts, scrap quilt patterns basically out of what I have. Not going to purchase anything major, other than when I find a pretty decent deal on fabric in colors or values I'm shy on as I haven't bought fabric in a really long time since I've been really focused on teaching jr hi for the past several years. They will be nice quilts when done - I'm too much of a perfectionist for them not to be reasonably well done, but not perfect. Close enuf that I'm not going to rip seams for a threads worth of missing a point, etc... I'm not making them w/a specific person or event in mind & am not making them w/any intention of turning out to be what I consider show-worthy quilts - tho they will probably end up being gifts. I don't think there will be too many that are simply left at stitch in the ditch, or outline stitching tho. Maybe that's part of the mindset that if we're using all these shortcuts, we should be seeing more on the quilt tops to dress them up - or make them more "arty" w/the quilting designed to set off the piecing designs by using more fillers & stippling, etc. and since machines CAN do it faster, it is possible to go back to those close lines of patterned quilting without investing the time it took for our quilting ancestors to hand quilt them in.
Well if you've gotten this far, hope this made sense. I'll get off my soapbox now & go back to practicing another pass or two on my machine/frame, & cutting pieces for a couple more 6" blocks for the Farmer's Wife Sampler BOM.