Practice What?

When you are as old as I am (no, don't ask me.....I'm as old as dirt!) you want to make every minute count 'cause you never know when you'll be called up yonder.

A friend of mine is teaching herself to do Free Motion Quilting  so I sent her a couple links to videos, loaned her a couple books, and CD of patterns.   Last month at our Tied Together Bee meeting, she showed me what she was doing and all the practice pieces she was doing.

mmmmh!  Practice again?  What about my time?  (Read the 1st sentence above again in case you missed it.)  and all those UFO's waiting?

Thought I'd try to do something different and play a little.  These two FMQ practice pieces were made quite a while ago right after I won Leah Day's book, From Daisy to Paisley.   She's the quilter who started the 365 days of FMQ designs.

Yes, they were fun to do.......and time consuming!  (Read the 1st sentence again..)

My friend got me all enthusiastic again, so I quickly made up a couple more quilt practice sandwiches and got going.

When I need to test my tension before quilting a project, I just grab up one of these quilt practice pieces, do a couple swirls.........and away we GO.

Practice?  Why?  Why not just "practice" some FMQ while making a few snack mats?

Front

Back

Okay...so far so good, and it was fun......so let's do a few more.  The stitches show up better on the backs of the snack mats.



There's more of them, (12 of 'em) but I don't want to bore ya'll to death.

So......do you "practice" first or do you just jump in and do it on a project?  Time's a Wastin' folks!

To receive all the scoop on my posts, just subscribe.  (RH side of the sidebar) 

Thanks for visiting.