joe'smom

I'm excited to have received the first two quilts back that I sent out for quilting, so I wanted to share.

My initial plan had been to be a hand quilter; but soon after discovering quilting, I lost my ability to sit for long periods at a time (due to back issues), so I turned to machine quilting (plus the fact that I was making far too many tops to ever hand quilt them all). After several years, machine quilting also became too difficult due to those back issues. It took awhile for me to come around to the idea of someone else finishing my quilts, but recently I abruptly realized that finished by someone else was preferable to never finished at all.

Since my energy is low and I can't drive myself around, I decided my best bet was to send my quilts out to a reputable quilting establishment in my state (to be end-to-end quilted with an allover design on a longarm machine), rather than shopping around for a local longarm quilter. They made the process very easy! I had the option of choosing my own quilting design and thread color, and whether or not I wanted the quilted top trimmed and bound.

For one of the quilts, I chose what I thought would be an appropriate design, and the thread color I thought would blend best with the many-colored top; for the other, I left both decisions to the quilter's discretion.

I'm pleased with both results, but I now find myself wondering what the quilter would have chosen had I not specified design and thread color for the one quilt, LOL. I think both quilts turned out very well, but the thread color on the quilter's discretion quilt, which I think is perfect, is darker than I would have guessed would look good, and I was very surprised to see that a straight-line design was chosen. Since I think it looks so good, I'm thinking I will always opt for quilter's discretion on choosing the best design and a thread color that will blend best with the front of the quilt.

So now I have to get to binding these quilts, which is a slow process for me because of restricted sitting time, but at this stage, I wasn't willing to pay for what hand binding would have cost. And I'm getting my next quilt ready to be sent out.

This brings me to the question of custom quilting, which isn't an option for a mail-order process. Are there types of quilts that you think/find an all-over design inappropriate or non-optimal for? I'm thinking particularly of the one sampler I have done. I haven't yet given thought to what would be best for that. For those of you who have your tops finished by someone else, is the custom option much more expensive?