I’ve finished the quilting and taken the quilt off the machine. Yay! This is a quilt to I threw together years ago as something I’d practice with once I finally got a longarm. So that’s what it was. Simply practice, and thank goodness that’s all it is. I know the first quilt is not going to be great, but the perfectionist in me is appalled. On the other hand, the tension is good and I learned a few things.
I’ve learned that I prefer manual mode on the longarm. Maybe if I practice more with regulated mode I’ll get the hang of it, but how the machine speeds up and slows down in regulated mode really throws me right now.
I’ve learned that what looks good in a doodle doesn’t always look good on the quilt. So practice it on fabric before stitching it on the quilt! The very first thing I stitched, I didn’t like. I thought I’d like to do some stitching that looked like tatting, but all it looked like on the quilt was an inside-out flower. Not what I was hoping for.
I’ve learned that I really, really need to relax. I found myself tightening up in my shoulders so much I felt like I was going to touch my ears with my shoulders. My stitching was smoother once I relaxed.
I learned that no matter how much I don’t feel like it, I need to dust the tracks and the wheels on the machine each time I come in to quilt. It sure doesn’t take much for the machine to have a mind of its own when running over a teensy piece of lint or dust.
I have another quilt like this that I quilted years ago and have never bound. This one is going to get folded up and piled with the old one. Not because I haven’t any intention of ever binding it, but because I want to bind them both with a pieced binding. I just need more bias binding scraps before I can finish them.
So, now that that’s done, I’m on to my next project!
