Grateful for help

 You will see from my posts that the past week has been almost completely focused on catching up on veterans quilts and I'm grateful for the help of 2 new quilters. 
​I showed you Marcy's quilts last week. Today I'm sharing Tina's. Tina is a new Innova owner and has taken a couple of my classes so I was happy to help her out with a few practice session for some new things she wanted to learn.

Because I load 2 quilts to quilt at a time on one wide quilt back, many of our piecers will quilt 2 of the same quilt and that's what we had with both quilts today. It looks like Tina quilted 2 quilts but she actually quilted 4!

The first thing she wanted to learn was stitch-in-the-ditch. We picked a blending thread and I showed her the basics and then she was off and running. The key to learning SID is to simply do it. This quilt was perfect because the fabrics are prints and it's almost impossible to see any mistakes. I wouldn't let her rip out mistakes. For the second quilt she wanted to practice spirals. I think she's doing a great job quilting circles.

I had 2 of these quilts too! I do love scrappy batik quilts. The quilting doesn't show so we could do anything that she wanted on them.

For the one on the right I taught her how to do pantographs and for the one on the left we decided to meander giant spirals. It takes a lot of muscle training to get big, smooth circles and she was really happy with how much better she got just quilting this one quilt.

You can take all of the classes in the world but you never learn until you practice. Charity quilts are a great way to practice.