As you know, I recently finished quilting the Lollypop Quilt that I’d been working on for about two hundred years or so, and so appreciated all your comments about taking time to sit back and live with the quilting before I made any rash decisions to become a Quilt Surgeon and slice and dice up the quilting I didn’t like.

Showing you pictures of my quilting close up is like agreeing to pose, at my age, in a bathing suit.  Probably not a good idea, but I wanted to show you how even rank amateurs like myself can be pretty happy with how things out.  I am even learning to like the quilting spots that I thought were a total fail.

Radiant mushrooms with echo quilting.

A feathery sort of stitch.  Every day when I’d start quilting, I type in “background FMQ filler” and read on the internet for a while, gleaning from the Master Quilters.

A sort of swirl-this-way-then-that sort of stitch.  Of course those long-armers make it look easy with their stitch regulators and space and ability to clamp down the quilt so it doesn’t move.  And I love learning from them and admire so much of what they do.  Which brings me to the title of this post.

One longarmer I dote on, learn from, admire immensely, and generally adore is Judi Madsen of Green Fairy Quilts.  She is a master–all her stitches are perfect and even, and she has fabulous designs, and a terrific book.  So I was more than excited when I noticed on her IG feed that she was quilting a Kim McClean pattern quilt, Kim being the woman who designed my Lollypop Tree quilt pattern.  Zounds!  I’ll learn from the best, I thought, because she is the best.

This picture is a snapshot from her blog post about the quilt, and I only insert it here to give you an idea of her style of quilting.  Really, I can’t say enough nice things about what she does.

You’re waiting for that other shoe to drop, aren’t you?  Okay, here goes.  These quilts are tough to quilt (why do you think I waited a century or so?) and so I was hoping that Judi, with her infinite skills and talent, would figure out a different way to enhance the quilt, to work with the quilt, to augment the quilt.  But I started to feel, as I looked through her post, that the quilting overpowered the quilt.  She even alluded to this same idea in her blogpost, a comment left somewhere by some random person, who was promptly tarred and feathered by all the blog commenters (one of the nicer names she was called was “blind critic”).  {Note: I found it curious that everyone leapt into action to defend Judi against this random contrary comment, but had no problem dumping vitriol and shame on that poor quilter who dared to say what she thought.  But that’s another post.}

My reaction came more slowly. A sort of creeping feeling that maybe I’m just not in the Great Big Quilter’s Loop or something, but I didn’t (can I say this?) like the quilting on this quilt.  It was stunning.  It was stellar.  It was perfection.  But I remember when making my quilt, spending hours on each block, choosing all the florals, working with the sinewy forms and floral blooms that I was thinking about nature and form and randomness.  And I guess I was hoping that Judi would find a way to make those shapes and forms burst right off the top into a new space.

Couple that feeling with a comment left on Instagram (above):  “Your quilting is prettier than the quilt.”  Hmmm.

Has the maker been eclipsed by the quilter?  Certainly quilting has become its own art form, in a way, but if the quilting is what matters, why not just send a pre-printed panel over to these long-armers and let them go to town?  Does it matter what we, as piecers and top-makers, do?  Is it necessary for our art and design to be subsumed into theirs?

I’m shaking my head, still trying to figure it out.