joe'smom

When should you . . .? When you don't want to or can't quilt it yourself and are willing and can afford to have someone else do it.

The thing that got me into quilting was looking at a photo of the stitching on a quilt and thinking, 'That's insane. I'm doing that.'

So the real point of pleasure for me is to do it myself. In the end, I haven't done much hand quilting because of back trouble that severely limits my ability to sit. Machine piecing, with it's short periods of sitting and standing, is what is accessible to me right now, so that's what I mostly do. Heaven to me would be sitting for as long as I wanted to, hand stitching.

michelle-quilts

I agree with SusieQOH. I want to complete the quilts myself from start to finish...but when I have tried on my machine, I get frustrated with anything larger than a wall hanging. I've tried using the larger decorative stitches (I call them winding road stitches) for machine quilting and still get frustrated. It's just not worth my frustration.

Though I must admit to having a stash of finished quilt tops that I haven't sent to the longarm quilter because the pricing around here is a bit much in my opinion.

If I win the lottery, my first purchase would be a house with a big enough room to then buy a long arm machine! LOL

petthefabric

I prefer piecing. Traditional quilts -to me- are utilitarian. Quilting is my creative outlet. (If you love traditional you can skip my opinion.) Flimsies are easier to store than finished quilts. When there’s a destination for a finished quilt it’ll get quilted. Physically, lap size is my limit. Larger go to long arm.

Art quilts————-that’s a totally different discussion as the quilting is part of the design. And I’m in my zone-creative element.

Are we having fun yet? I worked to survive, not for fun. Utilitarian quilting is work.