Progress on quilt

I've been picking away at working on the vintage bow-tie quilt. It seems easier to work on this right now, where most of the bulk and the weight is held by the frame, than the other quilt (the one in the hoop, where most of the weight sits on my lap).

I'm getting close to where I can move the quilt so I can easily reach the next couple rows' worth of blocks:



I've read some machine-quilters remark that they "can't see why" some people choose to hand-quilt. Well, I'm not crazy about trying to quilt on a machine: I don't find it restful, and it's hard on your forearm muscles. (Maybe longarm quilting is different). But with handquilting, I can be sitting down, mostly relaxed. It's a slow enough process that there are really no "oh, fudge!" moments - like, where the machine gets away from you and you put in a line of stitching you don't want. And what errors you do make seem to be easily enough fixed. (Most of the errors I make anyway are forgetting to quilt part of a block, and I can always go back later and do that).

It requires attention, but it requires a different *sort* of attention from machine quilting. In my few experiments with machine quilting, I was tense and on alert the whole time - looking out for things that might lead to an "oh, fudge!" moment. With hand quilting, I still have to pay attention to what I'm doing, but it's a *slower* sort of attention, if that makes sense. You don't have to think about "is the bobbin close to running out? Am I in danger of snapping the needle?* Am I straying too far from the pattern? Am I going too fast/too slow?"

(*Well, yes, this is actually possible but you can usually see it coming more readily in hand-quilting.)

There are more things to worry about with machine quilting (or at least, I find there to be), and so I don't enjoy the process the way I enjoy hand quilting.

But machine quilting has its place. If you need something done fast, if you want a quilt that's tough and sturdy (and that a new parent wouldn't feel bad about letting a child use), if you've made a quilt of heavier fabric or mixed fabric types that might be hard to hand quilt, it's fantastic. But hand quilting also has a place - yes, even still, even in this busy world. It's beautiful, when done well, it's restful for the person doing the quilting (or at least, I find that to be so), it preserves a tradition...

I think there's also something...spiritually instructive? about doing stuff like hand quilting. Yes, it is very slow. Some days your progress looks infinitesimal next to what you have left to do. But if you keep at it - if you "keep on keepin' on," eventually you get the quilt done. And you have that tremendous feeling of accomplishment. And for someone like me, I can look at the quilts I have hand-quilted, and think about them, and when I'm faced with some other task that looks insurmountable at the beginning, I can kind of grit my teeth and go, "Yeah? You've ALREADY hand-quilted a quilt with a 1 1/2" grid of squares on it; you can do this."