Yesterday I gave myself a day off from the tidying and attended a workshop in order to gain some confidence in free motion quilting. This is one of those things where I know the idea and the basics but have never actually used it on a quilt because I always 'chicken out' at the last minute in case I mess it up. It was a really enjoyable day and we came away with lots of ideas which we tried out on a 'quilt sandwich' of a reasonable size to get us used to handling the bulk in the sewing machine. I have a few blocks left over from a large quilt made some time ago and I'm going to bite the bullet and use free motion quilting to turn them into a lap quilt. One important point I gained from this day was that any minor imperfections don't matter because they show that the work was done by a human being - if you want 'perfect' you would send the quilt away to be quilted by a computer-controlled machine!! This reminded me so much of what Tim Holtz says about embracing imperfections - I never have 'hang-ups' about sloshing ink, random stamping and torn paper so I must translate that freedom into my quilting as well.
In the meantime I have a card to share which was made almost entirely from oddments 'found' when I was tidying my work space - backing paper cut to size for a card and then not used because the colour wasn't quite right; a piece of embossed background; a stamped and layered image cut away from a 'clean and simple' card where the final stamping of the sentiment had somehow turned out crooked (it happens). I simply added a couple of die cut shapes from kraft card scraps and a sentiment.
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