Ugly quilting and veterans quilts

When I used to teach beginner longarm quilting I had a saying that I hoped would give the new quilters the confidence to jump in and quilt anything. So many new longarm owners are afraid to quilt once they get their machines so I would say to them over and over:

Ugly quilting, done consistently, looks great.

Repetition is the secret to "hiding" mistakes or bad designs. Repeat that bad design enough and it looks intention and creates it's own pattern.

​Well, I got to test that out for myself again this week!

On this quilt I wanted to mimic the ribbon design but what I really meant to do was the ribbon meander. Instead I quilted the first pass with large loops and then realized my mistake. You can't ribbon meander a loop! Well, I do not ever take out quilting on veterans quilts. My goal with them is to quilt as many as possible so we can cover more veterans. I decided to ribbon the loops by going outside of each loop. Close up it's kind of a mess but from far away it looks like an intentional pattern. It's not my best work but it's OK.

This is what I intended to do on the first one!

This one is pieced with squares so that almost always means a wavy cross hatch for me. I quilted this quilt in about an hour.

In my quest to finish a lot fof quilts over the next week or so, I'm going to be doing a lot of ribbon meanders!