Caverswall Quilt Cave

 Marisabel finished adding her borders and sent an email to me angiequilts@gmail.com  to request that I reserve enough tables for her to make a sandwich. Now you should know by now that I am very helpful whenever I can so... 5 tables were ready when Marisabel arrived, she wasted no time at all in taping the back down, 'taut but not tight' and continuing through the process of sandwich perfection...

 We discussed several possibilities for quilting designs for Marisabel, it's quit a big quilt so we didn't want anything too "Turn-y" (another new word for Angie's Daft Dictionary!) Obviously there's the option for straight diagonal lines, nothing wrong with doing that... but how about we play with the patchwork shapes?... Whooping over steadily to the left and just before the edge of the block arrives,  curve over in your return to the centre, pause if you like... whoooop over right... return back to the middle but not quite to the start point and... loop left, return... loop over right stopping at the centre point to loop up and down with a finale of a wiggle to the centre of the top loop... easy... and it will look soooo cool! This can de done using the walking foot because all the lines are long and the curves are quite big but that means it will be quite "Turn-y"... Marisabel's going to have a go... maybe with the free motion foot...

Now then.. this business of free motion... here's someone's very own, very first attempt. It's Jean Bean. She has never tried free motion before, she never even knew that she wanted to try! ha ha ha...
See the scribble, perfect starting point... scribble, scribble, scribble... do a few pointy loops.. they turn into rounded loops very soon... If you've had a go at free motion quilting and your work looked like Jean's so you thought... " Oh I can't do it" so you gave up... please please try again... the very beginning is supposed to look like this, all I ask (if you are wanting to)... is that you just try, don't convince yourself that you can't do free motion because it doesn't look good enough in the first half hour, please?
On the other hand, if you've decided that you don't want to free motion and you're happy with your walking foot, that's absolutely perfect, I just don't want you to give up because you think you can't do it...
If you think about it, this beginning stage looks like children's scribblings... do you think our wonderful artists never went through this beginning stage? Practice makes us better, giving up achieves nothing.
Right.. I better get off this soap box... there's a shop to be opened!