I have always been facinated by optical illusions. A few years ago I went with my wife to the quilt show in Paducah and saw some really interesting tumbling block quilts. At the time, I was in the cabinet business and at the show I really studied the quilting frame displays. When we got home I built my wife a three roll quilting frame and began to get interested in quilting.
This past summer I went with my wife to the quilt show in Nashville and this time I got carried away with the sewing machines with embroidery modules. My wife already had a Bernina 150 but I wanted one of new machines with the computer aided embroidery systems. So when we got home we bought a Bernina 640, embroidery module, and Editor Plus software. Since this was mostly my idea, I just had to get into quilting to justify the expense.
I found the Karen Combs web site, bought her books and DVD and jumped right in. My first project was a single block just to see how putting all those diamonds together would work. Then I decided to make lots of blocks of different size and put them on one quilt. After sewing all of the individual block units, I spent several days on my wife's design wall moving the blocks around until I was happy with the overall design. I then machine appliqued all of the blocks onto a dark background and then machine quilted the project.
My wife does most of her quilting work by hand, she was not very encouraging when I wanted to machine applique all those small pieces and was even less encouraging when I wanted to apply the binding by machine. That is why all the help and advice from this discussion forum was so important and I really appreciate it.
Jerry in North Alabama