Originally Posted by
illinois
Being a "traditional" quilter, I hope there are divisions between hand quilted and machine quilted. I have seen some beautiful machine quilting but it makes me sad to go to a quilt show and see that so many have given up hand quilting. I see a huge difference between letting a machine create the stitching (either embroidery or quilting) as compared to what has taken hours of hand work and the skill required to do it well. Are we judging the finished product or the skill required?
I use a domestic sewing machine or my mid-arm Sweet Sixteen to free motion quilt my quilts. It takes a lot of skill to do this, the machine is simply making the needle go up and down-- I control the speed of the machine, the speed at which I move the quilt through it (which controls the stitch size) and I control the designs as well. I'm not sure why you are equating machine quilting with lack of skill unless you are of the mistaken opinion that fmq is done by computer.
rob