A tip

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I absolutely agonize over which quilting designs I’m going to use on a quilt. In the past, I’ve begun a motif, only to decide that it simply doesn’t work on that particular area, and then I’ve had to pick it all out. Ugh. However, I took a class from Vicki Ruebel, who does gorgeous longarm quilting and sometimes teaches at a local quilt shop. One suggestion she gave, and which most of us felt was worth the price of the class all by itself, was to use a plexiglass overlay. She recommends putting some very bright, quite wide masking tape all around the edges; this prevents accidentally drawing right off the edge of the almost-invisible plexiglass and onto the quilt top itself. That would be disaster! Anyway, the plexiglass allows doodling, using a dry erase marker of whatever color will show best against the quilt, and yet you can erase and modify to your heart’s content. The first photo is a small sample I recently did; it’s not exactly what I ended up with, but it gave me the “bones” of what I wanted to do, knowing that it would both fit the space and work in the way I envisioned. (Have I mentioned that I quilt better than I draw?)

So, once I’d decided on that design, the next step was to do the real quilting. This is how it turned out. Thanks to the “preview” on the plexiglass, there were no nasty surprises.