Jo Avery's CREATIVE CORNER

Machine quilting

As I discussed last month, my first attempt at quilting was by hand. But once I realised that you could make a whole quilt using a sewing machine, my quilting journey properly began. My first quilts were made on my childhood New Home sewing machine and quilted with the simplest ‘stitch-in-the-ditch’ straight lines. It took a few years before I started experimenting with free-motion quilting (FMQ). This was in my art quilt phase back in the 1990s, and so, the quilts were relatively small and easy to handle with my old machine. The free-motion quilt I produced was very improvisational and creative.

For nearly a decade I drifted away from quilting as my main passion and produced a bare minimum of quilts for friends and family. In 2009 I discovered the burgeoning online quilting community and became