Great thread! I am picking up some great tips. My question about sticking to a budget is getting the quilting done...I have a lovely quilt top I made for my daughter (Granny's Stars pattern); the LA quilter I asked was charging way more than I could afford. I'm thinking about learning to FMQ (hahaha!) on my little domestic machine just to get this quilt finished. In the future I will probably pick patterns with an eye to what sort of quilting they'll need - if it's simple I can do it at home, since it's so expensive to send it out for custom work.
What do you all do for quilting? What do you do when you need some really pretty custom quilting but can't afford to send it out?