What to Do If YOU Are Not Good at Machine Quilting

32 responses to “What to Do If YOU Are Not Good at Machine Quilting”

1. You are hilarious! Boy, I would hate to have been the person who had to clean that mess up!
   I’m not very good at machine quilting but I’m a whole lot better than I was so I’m happy!
   Thanks for the laugh this morning!

2. My Mom and Dad used to make homemade root beer during the summertime. We sat around the kitchen table eating spaghetti one evening when the bottles started popping all on top of us. They were being stored on top of the kitchen cabinets. When the summer heat (We had no air conditioning back then.), caused all the bottles to explode. Oh, were we ever disappointed. Their homemade root beer was so delicious.They never made it again, but the memories were precious!!

   1. Helen – my father, too, made root beer, but laid the bottles on shelves he had built in the basement. In a room under my bedroom. The inevitable happened one hot summer night, and for 6 months my bedroom smelled of root beer. To this day I cannot stand the smell (or taste) of root beer.

3. When ever I made a quilt for the grandchildren I always wrote words that related just to them. Some you could hardly read but——. It was fun!

4. That reminded me of when my mum used to make gingerbeer. The bottles were left Under the sink whilst they fermented, but one day they fermented too much and all exploded one after the other. The sticky mess took ages to clean, but at least it was in a small confined space!

5. Years ago, while I was in high school, someone gave my parents a bottle of dandelion wine. It was horrible! I got to have a few sips and the bottle went into the refrigerator. A few weeks later, my parents noticed the level of wine in the bottle was down quite a bit and my teen age brothers and I got grilled. The three of us stated we didn’t like it and had not been sipping on the sly and the parents were not believing us when my 6 year old sister pipes up “I like it, it tastes good to me”. She hasn’t had a alcoholic drink since. Teri probably did miss much.

   1. Now, that one is funny! 🙂

      1. Thank goodness she spoke up! That’s a great family story, so funny!

6. My FMQ is not perfect, but it is improving. I do not practice, except on the real thing. I tend towards denser quilting, so I get a lot of practice. Some designs are really challenging, so I stay away from them, at least for a while… Choosing forgiving designs is also a way to make the end result looking better.

   Secret messages: They go into quilts for my grand daughters. They make the top and I quilt them, sneaking in their name and other things they like to see.

   Dandelion wine: my husband’s great grandmother made that presumably successfully. I freeze and do not can anything. My disaster was in quilting pebbles on a quilt. To my surprise, they turned out well and I could actually do them. But my machine did not like it, so she started to sew only backwards! Fixed now!

7. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is a great read, winter or summer–one of my favorite books.

   I am not great at machine quilting, but I can definitely add personality. No one has complained yet.

8. Seems like most families have someone that did a funny something they aren’t allowed to ever forget, simply because it is funny. I would love to FMQ like you Lori, but I am not even close. Like someone else said I haven’t had any complaints though and I am improving too, thankfully. I enjoy it. Just wish I could think of a good motif for my Triple Irish Chain, I have a large dogwood blossom in the white area but haven’t been able to decide on how to do the chains part. I’ll just have to think on it so more.

9. I loved the dandelion wine story. It reminded me of a time in my youth, just entering high school. My mother got a recipe for dandelion wine from my grandmother and decided to make it. She had us (her children) gather the blossoms from the fields, and she made it in a very large container. She bottled it all in mason jars and it was stored. No jars exploded, but we all–children too–sipped on it all through the winter. It was though of at the “warm-me-up-potion” for coming in from the cold. It was my first taste of anything alcoholic, and I thought was quite good. So glad for the experience, but I’m not making it.

10. My dad was a winemaker back in the 70’s. He wanted to make dandelion wine so had all five of us kids out picking blossoms. We had to fill one grocery sack each. He missed the part where you had to remove only the yellow petals, so next morning he had five sacks of dandelion seeds! He never made his wine but we had a a lot fewer dandelions than
    usual in the lawn

11. I love the “Dandelion Wine” song!!

12. Dandelion wine. Wine made from the prettiest weed ever. I love your sweet mini, I know your sister will love to have this, made by you.
    The explosion sounds frightening.
    Practice makes perfect with almost everything in life…. isn’t there a saying something like by the time you are older…
    Well, whatever. I want to be good at finishing my pile of quilts
    I hope you are having lovely weather for a quick frolic outside.
    Here it is mighty humid

13. I am sure glad that I just canned about 30 pints of Morel mushrooms one yr. when they were so prolific that we couldn’t possibly eat as many as I picked, In retrospect, I should have strung them and then re-hydrated them to use for cooking.

14. What a fun story! I like to write messages to my grandkids in their baby quilts — I put the message in the inner border.

15. My first “real” kiss with a boy…warm Spring sun, the anticipation and anxiety of if I would know how to kiss properly, and a Mason jar of dandelion wine he’d snuck out of his family’s basement. 44 years later I can still recall all the wonderful warm feelings. Thanks for the quick trip back in time!

16. Great stories! Yours and the others. Memories like that are to be cherished (unless you’re the one cleaning up the mess!). I’ve never done any canning but I did have a funny incident with a can of tomato paste some years back. My electric can opener was broken so I’d been opening cans with the pointy end of an old-fashioned opener. Unfortunately I hadn’t noticed the crease in the side of the can. The instant I poked the opener in the entire can exploded!! The crease had allowed contamination so it was a tomato bomb waiting to happen. I took me days to clean up that mess and even months later I’d find a tiny blob of tomato in unexpected places! I learned a lesson – always inspect cans before buying – never take one that’s dented or creased. My mother is probably turning over in her grave laughing because I’m sure she taught me about bad cans. I probably was not paying enough attention at the time.

    I am not very good at FMQ – yet – but I look at it as learning to play the piano; stick with it, keep trying and you can’t help but get better. Plus it’s fun!!

17. My husband made wine for years….the fermentation is meant to happen in a vat or other container; once the furious first fermentation is over, one ‘jugs’ the wine with a waterlock so that the air bubbles are expelled and wine yeast has ‘consumed’ all of the sugars in the juice/liquid (and converted it to alcohol)…THAT is when you bottle. I blame the recipe! (My grandparents had a story about some strawberry wine that performed like the dandelion concoction–I won’t call the latter ‘wine’ .).

18. I’m not very good at FMQ either but as others have said, it takes practice which is what I do on the charity quilts for children. Yes, sometimes I do add special things in the quilting like stitching a simple teddy bear motif or special words, etc.

    Story is my Sister in law and I decided to make pickles. Followed the recipe, put the batch in a crock with a brick on the lid only to discover later all we ended up with was a soggy moldy mess! Never attempted again. LOL.

19. With 9 brothers and sisters there were lots of funny explosive moments. I feel I am getting much better at machine quilting. And I’m really good at drinking a glass of wine!

    1. …Especially a chilled glass of not-too-dry white. Yum.

20. Someone brought my parents some dandelion wine once. I took one taste and that was more than enough. I don’t know what they did wrong, but surely nothing to be consumed by humans is actually supposed to taste like that! My father then tried his hand at making beer. I love good beer, and have had a lot of different beers around the world, but I have only once in my life seen beer that glowed in the dark, was caterpillar gut green in the light, and tasted like a cat box smells. Sorry, Daddy.

21. It was always Beet Wine at our house (gram’s recipe which my mother made), and they had no fermentation disasters that I know about (always processed in regular canning jars). I’m learning FMQ with your tips, Lori, and enjoying every minute.

22. Thank you!… a 60+ years-old recollection!
    Dandelion wine!…
    Childhood memories of happily filling quart jars of pretty, yellow flower heads to give to my wonderful, sweet grandpa! He’d put our offerings into a big container (a barrel? vat??) in his garage/workshop… I never saw any more of the process, but was impressed by the powerful reaction of my dad and his brothers (dad was the oldest of five boys) as they’d sample grandpa’s wine later, in the winter!
    I never tasted it, but got the impression that it should be handled with “asbestos gloves”!
    Pat T.

23. I am the sister who tried to make wine. Thank you all for sharing your stories about exploding bottles. I am happy to know that I am not the only one. there is a sisterhood of failed dandelion wine makers out there. #sisterdandelion

24. Funny. I just bought your book and this popped up in Google feed for me to read.

25. No wine story, but when my brother was born, we were still living in WWII post housing. Yards were what you might expect-weeds everywhere. My great grandmother & great aunt came down to see the lil bundle. Aunt Susie sent me out into the front yard to pick dandelions for a salad; 5 year old me said WE ARE EATING WEEDS FOR DINNER??? I remember I never touched the finished product.

26. I made hubby a racing quilt for our 20th Anniversary, and hand quilted different things into the blocks. It is kinda like an ‘I Spy’ the fun quilting, and hubby loves to show off the different things I quilted into the blocks.

27. Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is a great book! I have read it many times.

28. My young neighbor made some grape wine that was to be buried in the ground for a specific time. The dirt exploded one day revealing broken glass and stained soil where the “wine” leaked away. He was so disappointed ! And I have used indelible ink to write hidden messages under appliques. Just considered them loving prayers.
    Lori, prayers for your beautiful mom. Enjoy each moment.