Quiltingboard Forums - In love with quilting, new to QB.

Welcome from Nevada! You've come to the right place to advance your quilting! All you need to do now is pick a topic and and look at the current tutorials that are available here, and see if one fits your needs. Perhaps it does, perhaps it only does partly. It it's the later, or if there is no tutorial on what you want to learn, post a new topic and ask about what you don't understand. It's always best to do single topics at a time, such as: "This is what I don't understand about 'stack and whack'", and you'll get help, or "Help! My method of 'stack and whack' isn't working', and then of course explain how you're doing it currently.

Just keep going through your list of questions, and I'm sure you'll have more questions as you go along.

I'm curious as to why "machine quilting" didn't work out for you. Is it your machine? Is the throat too small, or are you having difficultly with quilting on your machine? Or did you have trouble learning the procedure? I couldn't learn from the books, and a wise, experienced quilter had me start making "practice sandwiches" of a top and bottom fabric, with something in the middle to mimic batting. I used a lot of stuff from Good Will and the Salvation Army, because it was cheap, and sometimes the "batting" was old flannel from sheets or PJ's, or a piece of tablecloth -- things like that. Even paper towels will work. She started me with things like large floral prints on top, and had me free motion quilt around each of the flowers, not that I did it perfectly, but I kept practicing. When I got that down, the flowers started to get smaller, until I'd mastered that. Then I tried trees, vines, silly prints, anything I could outline. And in the process, I became comfortable with working the machine. In fact, I took control of the machine, instead of the other way around. I learned how fast I could go without skipping stitches around the corners, and how to set the tension without having "birds nests" of thread develop on the underside, and how to change the tension for various thicknesses of practice pads. I learned to take plain fabric and practice meandering and curved lines (still working on that). I made copies of stencils on my copier, pinned them to my practice sandwich, and worked on staying on the stencil lines until I could do it. Now I'm using stencils for a lot of free motion quilting. I've been copying them out of books right onto onion skin paper (a paper that is very light weight but strong enough to go through a copier) and I pin them to the quilt and stitch over the lines, and then the onion skin paper pulls right off easily.

One word of advice. Before you start a quilt, made a sandwich that is as thick at the quilt you are about to free motion quilt, and make sure the stitching is good, tension is set right, no binding of the bobbin thread, you're fine with the stencil if using one, and you're comfortable with the whole thing and ready to confidently take on the quilt. Very important. Leads to success!

Mind you, I have nothing against hand quilting. I do it myself sometimes, and when I was young, all we had was either tying the quilt or hand quilting. But my nieces and nephews and grand nieces and grand nephews have already told me they don't want any of that "hand quilted stuff" because it's "old fashioned", and heaven only knows they are victims of the "fashion police"! So what I send them must be machine quilted. And I adore them so much that I'll do it; they're "my" kids. It's fortunate that my 6 brothers and sisters love the hand quilted look, so I still get a chance to do it from time to time.

Anyway, Warmest Welcome to the Quilting Board! I'll look forward to your posts!