About 30 years ago I made my first quilt. A huge grandma fan in candy apple red. Then the kids distracted me and it was 27 years later I started sewing again. Now I used to do everything with scissors - cut, cut, cut. Patterns made out of old cereal boxes and a pair of hand scissors were tools of the trade. There were no such things as rotary cutters, fancy rulers, cutting mats and the such. And no one had a self threading - machine that did a zillion different stitches. If you had one that would go forward and backward you really had a killer machine back then. Lord I am so glad things have improved. Zip zip zip and we can have an entire quilt cut out in an evening. And in a weekend we can have the top done. I love tradition as much as anyone and I marvel at the patience and skill that it took to put a quilt together so many years ago. But I love progress. The complicated "looking" designs that we can do now could not have been done by the average quilter back then. So my hat is off to all those teachers and designers who make our love of quilting a shear joy - keep up the good work and thanks for making things so much easier. :thumbup: