And the quilting continues

Back of the quilt

 Sometimes I can be a slow learner. I've been quilting for many years now. With most quilts I machine piece the top and then hand quilt after putting the top together with the backing and the fill. I've quilted using both a regular quilt frame and a hoop; over 20 years ago I decided I prefer the hoop. It's less awkward. Plus, of course, it means that I get to wrap myself in the quilt as I work on it, which makes finishing a quilt the perfect winter activity.

Well, with every single quilt I quilted (with maybe one or two rare exceptions, usually when I decided to do something geometric with lots of straight lines I could mark with masking tape) I would bitch about how hard it was to mark the quilting pattern so I could see it. I tried everything: the pencils that supposedly wash out, markers with the fade-away ink, chalk (both in a pounce and tailor's chalk), even dressmaker's carbon. Didn't matter. There was always some fabric where the marking simply did not want to show up. I did a lot of muttering.

Finally, this winter, I had a flash of insight. Why not reverse quilt it? The quilting shows on both sides. It has to. The backing on my current project is plain muslin: no way would it be hard to see the marking pen on it. So that's what I'm doing. End result? As far as I can tell, you can't tell the difference between the front and back quilting stitches on the parts that are done. Even better, I think I'm setting some sort of a speed record for me on quilting this particular project, which is good because it's a queen-size. I may actually finish it before the snow is gone.

Front of the quilt

The quilt itself is a pattern called "Blizzard" on the quilting calendar I found it on so I'm using the quilting stencil I had that came closest to looking like a snowflake. Because snowflakes are random when they fall, so is my quilting pattern placement. I started in the middle and have been working out sort of concentrically from there. I suppose if I were really ambitious (a true artist?) I'd have made a snowflake stencil but I didn't think my drawing talents were quite that good. I was never particularly good at making simple snowflakes when I was a kid; I doubt if I've improved with time.

Doodle pattern

A small digression: the last time I went to a quilt show, there wasn't a single hand-quilted quilt there. Apparently hand quilting is becoming a lost art. There was a time when the typical quilt show would include at least one white-on-white quilt, i.e., a quilt done simply so the quilter could show off the quality of his or her hand quilting skills. Those days are gone. No one seems too inclined to put in the 100+ hours a typical hand-quilted large quilt requires. Every single quilt at the most recent show was labeled as "pieced [or designed] by X, quilted by Y" and the quilting was machine quilting, usually in what I think of as the doodle pattern.

I've used that pattern myself, but usually just as fill between other motifs. I think I'm becoming a quilting snob -- when I see an otherwise lovely quilt finished with squiggles, I tend to think the quilter was lazy. Surely there are machine patterns that could be used that would actually complement the pieced design instead of just functioning to hold the whole thing together. But maybe thinking that way is the quilter's equivalent of "You kids get off my lawn." I'm getting old. . . more and more often I find myself muttering that no one today has the patience for "real" craftsmanship.