I’m Not a Good Night Time Student

I’m three and a half months in on mastering my new hobby of quilting. I know that is not long enough to become good at something, but since I have made two king sized quilts, a twin and a dozen placemats my run rate is higher than average. Since I am using my 25 year old sewing machine I have not tried to tackle the actual quilting of anything larger than a placemat. For those of you who have never “quilted” understand that I am making the pieced tops of quilts and someone I pay is making the sandwich of top, batting and backing and doing the all over sewing that gives it the “quilted ” look.
I wanted to step up my quilting skills so I decided to take a class at the Cary Quilting Company. I chose the “free motion quilting class” as opposed to the one where you learn to do straight lines. Well, that is what I thought.
It was a small class of six and one very knowledgeable instructor, Christine. Once we went through the technical machine set up intro we got to practicing quilting. It started with straight lines. Wait, I’m not good at straight lines, the whole reason I was taking the class was to learn curvy stuff.  
Eventually we got to loops, hearts, flowers, stipples and back to straight lines. Like all skills it has to be practiced to master and I could not even keep at it for the whole three hour class. Obviously I needed the early morning class.
I think I am thankful that my old machine is not large enough to handle quilting a big piece. I am going to practice all I learned on placemats, but not worry about the big stuff. See, if I took to it I would want a new very expensive sewing machine and that just seems a little excessive. It’s just like if you gave a mouse a cookie. If I were good at quilting then I’d want a new machine and if I got a new machine then I’d have to get more, and better fabric and to get better fabric I would have to go on a road trip to many different fabric stores. And if I was on the road I couldn’t be quilting because my new fancy machine would be at home.
It was probably good I took the night class where I was at my worst as a student. I just saved Russ the equivalent of a new car.