Originally Posted by
Holice
Why is that most believe FMQ is just meandering across the surface of the quilt Back in the 1980's when Harriett Hargrave introduce the concept of machine quilting (one of the first to do so) she used traditional quilting designs to do by machine rather than by hand. Hari Walner was another. A whole series of quilting designs/stencils came on the market referred to as Continuous Line Designs. These designs were created to follow closely those we had used for hand quilting but redesigned to require as few starts and stops as possible - usually with one continuous line.
I am wondering why we have gotten away from using these type designs.
I feel like your observation is opposite--as the implication is that why have we "downgraded to only stippling" ...however, ...many of us haven't "graduated" to these types of designs...yet.
I do mostly meandering now because I'm just learning to do something else. I don't have a desire to mark up my quilts, so whatever I do needs to be simple enough to do them free hand. Until I can effectively learn to move around a quilt on my machine, fancy stitches won't look great.
1. I only started FMQ last summer. I'm learning more, but I do mostly bed sized quilts. When you look at the instructions on the internet, most show small pieces they are working with...not real quilts. Moving around a larger quilt, whether twin or larger is a whole 'nother skill set.
2. Simple meandering is faster than anything else for charity quilts. I am personally very pleased I am learning this skill as I was tying my charity quilts. I feel like I've gone "up a notch" on the quilts in order to be able to do this. Going fancy takes too long. Why should I spend that long on a charity quilt? I have only 1 life. Doing a nice meander, here in Poland is fantastic. People have never seen it done before. Most quilts that they buy in the store have a few straight stitches running down the length of the quilt, holding the three layers together.
But I don't actually think that most think that FMQ is simple meandering, but that meandering is the simplest of the FMQ skill set.