And so it begins.....

I have always had a love-hate relationship with quilting. I tried once, maybe 20 years ago and the result was not pretty - really it wasn't. So that was the end of that, I vowed never to go there again. No way, no how, was I going to become a quilter! But it did keep niggling at the back of my mind. You see, it really bugs me when I can't do something. It grates away at me until finally I have to do it just to prove to myself that I can - once accomplished, I'm perfectly happy to move on. Probably there is some psychological term for this, but whatever. As a result I have been skirting around the quilt world for a long time. Kind of hard to be a sewist and not notice a few quilts here and there along the way. I attempted a doll quilt back in the spring, and all went well but I was still stuck on the stippling - so I cheated and used my embroidery machine for that part. But see that's where it kept bugging me - "you should be able to stipple", my brain kept saying.

Next I tried this stipple design set from Eileen Roche - which uses a unique piecing approach and allows you to machine quilt using your embroidery machine. That resulted in this purple quilt for my daughter. Well really she got it by default since it was a tester piece and the only fabric I had enough yardage of in my stash was purple. So that pretty much meant it was destined to become hers. This quilt took me a good 3 days of patiently waiting on the machine to finish and then moving the hoop progressively along the strips until all 7 of them were completed. Then I had to piece it. It turned out ok, but I wasn't really loving it and it was a ton of work - I'm an instant gratification girl and this was taking too long. Plus, my brain still wasn't satisfied. It kept whispering "stipple, stipple", to me. Yeah I'm weird like that.
Fast forward to the doll quilts - last blogpost - I figured I might as well try the stipple free-motion quilting on one of them since it was just a doll quilt and not a huge investment in time and money. I had watched the You-tube videos, and checked out the quilt blog tutes (thank-you Dog Named Banjo and Crazy Mom Quilts), I was prepared! Amazingly, the result actually turned out pretty well. I was totally stoked with myself for having conquered the stipple. Enough so that I felt like I could stipple this much larger Neptune quilt. I had put together that quilt for my mother-in-law. Et Voila! Not too shabby if I do say so myself even without a fancy BSR (which I would dearly love) and finally finally, I can check that one off my list. Trouble is, now I have the stipple bug - I want to make more of these quilts. They are so cool and soft when they come out of the wash all raisin-like. The next one is already sandwiched and awaiting the machine and I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to stop there!

Happy Sewing!