Quilting . . Then and Now

Sometimes when I'm alone and quilting, my mind wanders. Today was one of those days. I was thinking about all the quilting gadgets that we have now that our grandmothers didn't dream of having. I suppose it was these new Fons & Porter pins that triggered my thoughts today. I had heard a lot about these new directional pins although I didn't have a clue what they were. Last week I headed to Hobby Lobby with my 40% off coupon intending to buy these much talked about pins. I think you are supposed to use the pins labeled "D" when sewing seams that will be pressed/sewn down; the ones labeled "R", when sewing seams that will be sewn/pressed to the right. Maybe because you really can't teach an old dog new tricks but I stood there and looked at them, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the pins would confuse me and I didn't get them. I did get the new Fons & Porter glass head pins that also come in the nice tin. I was thinking about how my grandma quilted. Life and circumstances were hard in her times. They grew their own food and she worked hard in the fields alongside my grandpa, they had no air conditioning and that's almost unbearable in Louisiana. Yet, she found time to sew and quilt. Her patterns were either from the newspaper or patterns friends had given her that they had traced onto newspaper. There were no cutting instructions, no pressing instructions, no fabric requirements and yet there were some gorgeous and much coveted quilts made in those days. Now, the patterns tell us everything! Quilt shop owners tell me that unless the samples are made of fabrics currently available in the shop, they don't sell. People want exactly what they see. No imagination! Quilt patterns have yardage requirements, cutting directions, sewing directions, pressing directions, quilting directions, binding directions .. I am hearing complaining now that some patterns do not include the quilting directions. No imagination! Kits are very popular and I'm surely not knocking kits but I'm just thinking . . I don't want my quilts to look exactly like 500 other quilts made from the same pattern, same fabric, same quilting design. What do you think the next generation of quilters will have that we don't have? I can't even imagine! I guess if I could imagine it, I could create it and sell it and get rich! But I think of the things we have that our grandmothers didn't have:

• Electric sewing machines with perfect 1/4" feet, some have built in even feed (yes, I want a Janome 6600). The machines have needle threads, and thread cutters.
• Rotary cutters with all the perfect rulers
• Templates - there are templates in all sizes. Templates for cutting pieces, templates for quilting designs
• Fabric calculator - this is a new tool and I love it!
• Longarm, shortarm and mid-range machines for doing the quilting on the machine
• Electric Quilt software. I suppose just the computer itself was so foreign to my grandmother that software to design quilts would have blown her mind.

There's probably no real point to this post but if anyone wants my advice (yes, I know -- no one wants my advice!) I would say be creative. Don't limit yourself to what someone else has written. Magazines and quilting books are a great source of inspiration but if you only follow the instructions, you will never know what you might accomplish. When I get a quilting magazine (and I get plenty!), I'll often take a design in the magazine and draw it out in EQ and play around with it and change a few things. I rarely make anything exactly by the pattern. You may be 100% thrilled making things exactly by the pattern but my challenge is to try just a little deviation, you may surprise yourself at what you can do. Judy L.