Practice, practice, practice

When my mother was out visiting, she and her friend got me started on hand quilting. She gave me a special thimble and an embroidery hoop with a little lap stand, too, so now I am all set to start a hand quilting project using proper hand quilting - once I can truly figure out what it is I'm doing.

(Proper hand quilting isn't exactly intuitive. Take a look at the stitch here Confused yet?)

I've done enough to realize that it'll take a lot of practice before I'm confident enough to do it on a real project. So I have a hoop set up with some scrap fabric and batting so I can try to get a few stitches on a needle at a time without having my stitches be an inch long. And in the meantime, I'll go back to "cheating" and finish up an in-progress project using my nice old familiar stab-stitching method. Only another quilter would be able to tell ;)