Got a new pantograph called 'Hot Rod' which I really liked
All while I was struggling with the bent pole which pulled the quilts to the left. Did some more freemotionquilting practice as well but apart from that was pretty much out of action for the last 5 weeks. This gave me a lot of time to think the whole frame business through and in the end I decided to give the frame a miss.
I was missing the therapeutic slow stitching of the sitdown machine a lot. While there are a lot of benefits to quilting on the frame (most notably the easy loading of the quilt) I had more and more the feeling that it is not for me. Given that I had a lot of problems with the set up this put a very negative slant on things which in the end I just could not got over. The new pole arrived but by then I had decided to call it quits as it would have taken me another few months to really feel comfortable with it. Mind you, I am doubtful that I would have advanced to the standard that I am used to in just a few months. While I have quilted a fair few charity quilts on the frame since it first arrived I did not get a great deal of satisfaction from this as I did not feel that I was gaining control of the machine for some of the more detailed work. This meant that I have done none of my own quilts or my workshop sample and I was getting further and further behind.
All in all though a valuable lesson as I had to really think hard about which direction I wanted to go and what makes quilting enjoyable to me. I do like to stitch slowly and deliberately, look at the entire quilt adding a few things here and there where I think it needs more quilting. Obviously I like precision and control which I feel I got more with my hands than with handles I have to hold, particularly for more detailed work. Clearly this is something that one can learn with time and sustained effort, in fact I was already getting quite good on the pantograph quilting. It was easy-ish, very fast and meant that I could knock off the charity quilts in no time at all. However, this is not the only thing I want to be able to be doing and that is what got me thinking about what I prefer.
Anyway, so we took the machine off the frame and put it back in the table and I am back to my normal quilting. Will need to finish off a workshop sample for a Feather workshop that will run in the second half of the year. Bummer...I will have to pinbaste again...that was such a great thing about the frame...just roll it on and you are ready to go.
Karin
