Saturday Thoughts While Quilting

In a couple of evenings after work this week I put together a jelly roll quilt top.  It's the third one I've made this way and I love the mindless stitching and the quick results.  You know the pattern, which is really no pattern at all - you sew the strips together end to end and then you take the two ends and start sewing again, and and then you do it again until you get to the final size.

Another evening I sandwiched it and today I quilted it.  I love this quilt for a myriad of reasons  - It's a great size for covering yourself while you read a book or watch a movie, it's very quick to put together, and you could go the easy route and buy a jelly roll or you could use your scraps and just cut 2 1/2" strips of your own choosing.  What's not to love about that, right?

I quilted this one with different size loops.  I've been doing my own machine quilting for a year or so now; maybe it's been two years...I really don't know...but mostly I do stippling because for some reason that seems easy to me.  I'm trying to branch out so today it was loops.  I have this problem with loops though.  I love them.  I love the graceful motion of swooping around and making a circle.  It reminds me of an ice skater making a figure eight.  Except there's one problem.  I drive too fast.  Yes, in my car too, but especially as I "swoop."  When you do that your stitches get longer and loonger and looonger.  And then you slow down and they get smaller and, well you probably get the picture.  I was sitting there lamenting the various sizes of my stitches when I remembered something my beautician told me recently.

I get my hair cut every four weeks and while I'm there she waxes my eyebrows.  One day I complained because one eyebrow was longer than the other.  She fixed it but then said, "you know, Marlene, your eyebrows are sisters but they're not twins."  Hello.  God made us all different.  Apparently He even made our eyebrows different.  Despite the unevenness of our eyebrows we are all beautiful.  What in the world makes me think all my stitches should be identical?  If they were all the same they might was well have been done solely by a machine without my guiding hand.  And it's my hands on that quilt that make it so special to the ones I gift them to.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.