Tops to Treasures - check it out!

Cindy of Tops To Treasures, who is a professional long-arm quilter, has written a really great post on free-motion quilting versus longarm machine quilting. If you suffer from a bad case of long-arm-envy like me and have been in awe of long-arm quilters, go along and check out her post about Waldorf (I think I'll call him Wall-E for short), her long arm machine, and how he works differently to a domestic machine. It's a really encouraging post for us amateurs! Cindy is going to be guest posting next year when we get going with the QAYG FMQ QAL. 

I've had a couple of questions from people. 

1) How do you define intermediate? 

In the absence of a definitive curriculum from the Quilt University (maybe there is one but I haven't seen it), I'm thinking about this and will post my thoughts sometime soon. 

But one of my lines of distinction between beginning and intermediate FMQ-ers is that your intermediate person is brave enough to take the step of using different coloured thread to background fabric and is comfortable with the way it looks when you CAN see the stitches. (I recommend beginners to quilt a few projects using same coloured thread as background or invisible thread just to get the practice in and be pleased enough with yourself to put the work up on display when you can't see all the stitches clearly). 

What do YOU think makes an intermediate FMQer?

2) I haven't FMQ-ed but this looks fun. Do you think I can join?

A few people have asked about joining in without being able to FMQ. I think the main point of this is to build your quilting skills from where you feel comfortable. 

So if you want to join in and do your own quilting patterns using normal machine quilting and experimenting, you are most welcome. There's a lot you can do with a walking foot. I've seen people do circles, zig-zags and box type designs using a standard walking foot so please feel free to adapt the idea and work with us to suit your own needs and capabilities.