HATING my quilt!

[Leersia]

I just finished my first quilt top, a baby quilt, and I loved the way it came out. THEN, I made the mistake of deciding I was going to quilt it myself instead of just farming it out to someone who knows what they're doing. I bought a walking foot, and a special quilting darning foot (the clear "bigfoot"), I had to make some broad circles around some of the squares, and every little wiggle and imperfection stands out like a sore thumb - and I haven't even started on the "free-motion" quilting yet. AAAArgh! I'm going to have to rip out most of what I've already done. What a pain. If I stick with it, will it get easier, or should I just let someone else do it? What do you quilters do? Even if I can make this look decent, I can't imagine trying to do a larger quilt on my machine; I'm getting lost on this little thing as it is.

[dynamicdoula]

Try renting time at a local quilt shop on a long arm!

[Vanessa]

Look for this book at your library:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/157...Fencoding=UTF8

It's really great. I took a class based from it, and I loved it. Unfortunately, my machine doesn't have great tension for free motion quilting, so I am saving for another one, but it was really informative. I just use my regular stitch to quilt in straight and diagonal lines on things that I don't want to handquilt at this point. I've done a fullsized quilt without any problem. I use fusible batting because I am way too lazy to pin a quilt 9000 times.

Be patient and practice. I think it's worth it to learn as they charge a lot to quilt simple things for you. I don't live anywhere near a longarm to rent, but that could be interesting.

Don't give up yet!

[Jooksta]

I actually prefer to hand quilt. I do machine quilt on my sewing machine if it's stitch in the ditch type. I also did a huge ivory quilt with free motion using matching thread. It turned out better than I expected.

But I do enjoy the hand quilting part as much as piecing the top or applique work. The motifs look better when hand quilted, and I make less mistakes. Also, it is a nice change to just sit in an arm chair with the quilt draped over my lap, hand quilting and watching TV, or chatting with other lady friends, rather than spending so many hours with the sewing machine. For me, this is the fun and relaxing part.

[claras_mom]

I know this thread is a couple weeks old, but thought I'd throw in my 2 cents anyway.

- yes, it will look better the more you do it.
- but if it really bugs you enough to rip it out, before you start again, do a practice piece with just some plain fabric and leftover batting.

Unless of course, you've already done all that!

I've been a quilter for years but am still a novice with machine quilting. For the big stuff--quilts that have to be big enough to cover all three of us!--I save up and have it professionally done; for smaller pieces, I try to remember that hardly anyone will look as closely as I do when I'm working on it, if that makes sense! In a perfect world, I'd probably hand quilt everything, except that I like to sleep under quilts, so I have to be able to finish things occasionally!