Machine Quilting Class

My guild - Des Moines Area Quilters Guild hosted local speaker Dawn Cavanaugh in January.  Once upon a time, Dawn was one of the first longarm machine quilters in our area.  She machine quilted my very first large quilt, that I made in 1995 for my brother and sister in-laws wedding.  She quilted 3-4 more quilts for me -- My calendar block of the month, my green concentric squares, and a star quilt that I made with 30's reproductions, which won  a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair.  Since I was on a limited budget when I started quilting, I only sent her large quilts that I didn't feel I could handle on my sewing machine. 

She got better and better, I moved to Chicago...she is now an instructor for APQS quilting machines and no longer quilts for customers. I am still trying to master machine quilting myself. 

I took her grid fillers class, and after seeing the feather class sample, I wish I would have signed up for that also!    I am still a bit frustrated relearning how to quilt on my new sewing machine.  I thought taking a class would force me to practice.  In reality though, I am just really into piecing quilt tops right now, and not about perfecting my machine quilting.  They both take a lot of time, and I just prefer piecing over machine quilting right now.
Here is the class display sampler, we learned 20+ grid filler \ background quilting patterns.

The first part of the class, she lectured, and gave us some practice sheets, and some acrylic overlays to practice on, will she showed us the best path to do some of the more intricate patterns. 

Then we marked our practice pieces:

Unfortunately I was not feeling well this day at all, I was still battling my 2 week cold.  I stitched two or three sections, but I was getting frustrated with the results.  For me that is pretty typical, it is hard for me to get comfortable in a class setting.  I was also frustrated as I am still learning this machine, I didn't like the free motion foot I have for my machine...and the list of frustrations continued.  I put my sewing away, and just practiced on paper instead.    I didn't even take a picture of any of my stitched sections.

I am looking forward to trying some of the patterns on my monthly mini quilts.  Good class, I just wished I felt better!