There was a time is my life that I was a stay at home mother of 5; I would cook, bake and sew and sew and sew. Yes, I have to say “I loved to sew and create.” It was a special season of my life. As the years went on, there a came a point in my life that I started to learn about piecing quilts. I just loved the challenge and looked for every opportunity to educate myself about quilting. So, for years I would “hand quilt” everything! In fact, I had the understanding that if it wasn’t “hand quilted”, then it wasn’t in the purest form “a quilt”. Looking back, I remember going into the Quilted Apple Quilt Shop in Phoenix, Arizona and noticing the machine quilted samples in the store. I thought that was appalling and they should have been hand quilted. I even commented to my mother, that doing it by machine was the easy way out.

Now, I have to eat those words. Machine quilting is not the easy way out. In fact, I believe it is a talent which only quilters that do machine quilting truly understand. Here are a few of the differences between hand and machine quilting: