Learning to Stitch with Reckless Abandon
Posted by Teri Lucas on Jul 14th 2020
Oh how joyful it is to stitch with reckless abandon. As one can imagine reckless abandon doesn't happen overnight. There are many moments filled with anything but abandon, where shoulders and ears become one body part, eyes are fatigued from focusing so hard near (but not on) the needle, frustration wondering if the stitching will ever resemble what I see in my head, leaving the machine sitting there with the quilt under the needle for days on end wondering how much I can get for the whole kit and kaboodle.
Then there are the other questions what will the really good quilters say when they see my stitching? Will they say all the negative stuff that ran through my head while trying to quilt this? No, they really don't say that kind of stuff. They show you, point out where you're doing well. And if you ask they'll tell you how they might approach machine quilting, changing tension, trying different needle and thread pairings, or reminding you that the machine might need a quick trip to the spa. "But how will I do any quilting if the machine is at the spa?" we think.
And then there's that moment, when something changes, the quilting becomes easier. The shoulders and ears remember they have their own places and are relaxed into those. The quilt moves easily under the needle, consistent stitches forming, highlighting the curves, and lines of the quilt, or abandoning convention all together stitching wild feathers over the surface of the quilt simply because it's possible and you can. Phew.
Learning to Stitch with Reckless Abandon allows us to, without fear, try new to us thread weight, and thread color. Just as color has value (light and depth), practice has value in that it offers us opportunities to problem solve. The problem solving made it's way into the pages of Color, Thread & Free-Motion Quilting – Learn to Stitch with Reckless Abandon as a way of allowing you to dive into machine quilting, exploring the color you love, and the taking the opportunity to see how color plays over the surface of a quilt. Quilting is our happy place, let's go there with reckless abandon.
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