Lobster

You reckon? I'm broke and can't afford much fabric, so I spend a long time on each quilt, making something detailed. I see people making quilts really fast, and apart from the fact that it's just not my quilting style, I do sometimes wonder how they can afford all the materials.

I think that both modern and traditional American quilting have enough possibilities that you can make either a quick and easy quilt within that framework, or a difficult quilt that takes a long time. The same goes for the other styles of making a quilt. Not necessarily all of them: I've never seen a basic-level Welsh quilt, for instance, because Welsh quilting was traditionally done by professionals, so while the piecing is sometimes quite simple, the quilting is dense and fairly advanced. And I don't know much about quilting traditions from other countries, so I can't speak for them.

I think there's a tendency to think that quilting is just traditional American quilting. That's a very big genre, yes, but it's far from being the only one. Similarly, modern quilting isn't the only type of contemporary quilting out there.

Am I the only one who finds that a lot of modern quilting actually looks very retro?