Getting Ready

I like you have struggled being a better machine quilter.

I recently had a woman confided in me after being in my machine quilting class all day, that she had taken a ZANIX in the a.m. because she was so afraid of machine quilting.

I was quite taken aback. Isn’t this suppose to be fun, aren’t we doing this because we fell in love with fabric and wanted to make quilts?

Well it got me thinking about how and what I teach in my Frieda’s Fun Free Motion Machine Quilting class.

Let’s talk about what will help you be a better machine quilter.

First and foremost, in my humble opinion, start out small.

Don’t do what I did and start right in on a queen size bed quilt. This is overwhelming.

Start by making smaller projects, like one of my patterns, and machine quilt that.

But even before that make yourself some quilt sandwiches, like the ones I am doing here in anticipation of demoing at the Fairfield Booth #936 in Houston this week.

Start with an easy design like curly ques and swirls.

If you are anything like me you learned to write in school by making circles and sticks – OVER AND OVER again. I don’t think they let us write in cursive until we were in the third grade!!! We had to practice for two years first!!

Same with machine quilting. I am getting ready to demo machine quilting at the Fairfield booth in Houston. Fairfield is the type of batting that I use most often.

Here are just a few of the things I do before I start to machine quilt any project.

Hope I see you all in Houston.

Getting Ready to machine quilt