I went to my class on Saturday and I would highly recommend taking a class. She did not teach to pantographs or to the computer LA's. She taught free hand quilting. I was relieved since the only information available about the class was just the name. I was very nervous since I had not had my set up for a long time. (I have a Juki 98-q with a Little Gracie II frame) The only thing I had done so far was about two rows on my frame of meandering. What I learned from her was that free hand quilting was so much fun! She started the class with the rules... THERE ARE NO RULES!!! AND NO QUILT POLICE~~ Once that was out of the way we relaxed and had enjoyed her teaching! She showed us the difference between meandering, stippling and leaves. She told us some of the things she does to improve her FMQ and the best advice was to doodle lines squares anything you can think of you because if you can doodle it you can long arm quilt it. She set up the stores gammil but we really were more interested in the drawing aspect of it which was really nice since that was where I was having the most trouble. She had us bring in a project and the best part was seeing the others works. So beautiful and then we had to help come up with the quilting desgins and let me tell you it was so much easier I could actually SEE the quilting design rather than panic. My new favorite tool you need to go to a hardware store and pick up a piece of Plexiglas about 20x32, some duct tape for the edges and some vis a vis pens (the over head pens that erase with water) This wonderful tool is the best way to test your quilt design. How you use the Plexiglas is put the sheet on your quilt and draw the pattern you want that way you can test out different designs before you do the actual work. Once you get a pattern you like set the Plexiglas near your sewing machine or LA so you can see it while you quilt (we had many different levels of skills one had a domestic machine, I had a juki with a little gracie II frame and the other 2 had gammils) This was the best part because all of the techniques she taught could be used with a domestic machine or a LA machine. I felt so much more confident now that I had this class.
I would recommend when choosing a class to look for one that will handle what you want to learn. I had no idea she was only going to teach free hand which actuall worked for all of us but some might want more. See how many will be allowed in the class I found that the smaller the class size the better we were to ask questions and feel comfortable in what we were doing. Her idea on teaching was that this was our class we controlled the pace and what was going to be taught. We ended up going over everything she wanted and more. I paid $35 for the class and feel like I got a million dollars worth of information!