We are almost done with our 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Quilter! Each week I have been thinking..."What do I think the next habit will be?!" We are in the transition period of one Quilt Roadie adventure to the next and so there is reflective time on where we have been, where we are going and what I have accomplished. G has piles of videos to edit and we have lots to share in this second season of Quilt Roadies! I hope you will subscribe and travel along with us.

As many of us are...I am my own worst critic. I get lots of mail about, "How do I get so much done?" And when I look at the photos I share on Instagram and Facebook...most of them are process photos. Not the finished product, lol. What I can say about my stitching is...I rarely sit without taking a stitch or two. I learned this from my friend Sandy who lives a busy life helping run a farm. Her sewing room is very compact and only about 3 feet from the kitchen where she makes lunch and dinner for her family crew! Prolific is a word I would use for her AND what she shared with me years ago is that if she had 15 minutes between tasks she would sew a seam or take a stitch and all those 15 minutes added up to a finished quilt. I took this lesson to heart.

Thus...A Stitch in Time Saves Nine is #6 of the Habits of a Highly Effective Quilter. As I did research on this proverb, I interpreted its meaning to us as quilters...that if you only take a stitch or two...you will eventually get to the end of your creation. It is when you do the self talk about not having enough time to sit and stitch that quilts languish. I have projects scattered about the house in various stages, which means that when I sit, there is a project that wants a stitch or two!

 

 

 

I also pay attention when I am on the road to how other quilters are saving time! When the owner of the shop in Hot Springs, South Dakota, Heartsong Quilts, (don't you love that name) shared a binding tip with me I was all about it!!! I know the judges out there are screaming foul...that all quilt bindings need to be hand sewn...but really, as she shared with me, our quilts for the most part are machine pieced, machine quilted, and the binding is machine sewn to the quilt. So why does the final step need to be hand sewn?

On her quilts she chooses a decorative stitch that she likes and fun thread for the final binding stitch and it looks wonderful. If you stitch the primary attachment stitch for the binding onto the back of the quilt and then flip it over to the front, you can create a perfect decorative stitch on the front...A Stitch in Time Saves Nine...the quilter's way!!!

Have a great week and be sure to keep up to date with us on Instagram, Facebook, Quilt Roadies (YouTube) and on wooliemammoth.blogspot.com. Just so you know, I do check every request to follow on Instagram and Facebook and if I can't figure out if you are a quilter because your site is totally private, I will pass to weed out the non-quilter requests, LOL

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