I thought I should step out of my comfort zone, so I signed up for a Laura Heine class in October. I picked a pattern I thought would be easy, but it took forever to finish because it is huge ("Birch Street" photo attached). It took four months to fuse everything down, and now I will take another several weeks to quilt it on my home machine. Some suggestions... Choose a small project to learn with and, if you like the process, you can do a larger piece. If you don't like it, you can move on to something else. It's a very intense process. Do the background first even though the pattern says to do it last. You can then cover the edges with the embellishing pieces. Buy the sharpest scissors you can (Karen Kay Buckey's are great) to avoid fraying, but some of your fabrics may still fray. Batiks are really useful. Share fabrics with others in the class if you can to get a variety. Expect to end up with a whole lot of fabric with fusible on the back that you won't know what to do with!