I keep looking for inspiration in books and magazines, hoping that I can just use some of my stash, rather than buying yet more precuts. I've been hitting the local library more than usual lately, and discovered on my last visit that they seemed to have more quilting books in stock than usual, or at least different ones than I had seen before. But once I got home and sat down with my borrowed booty, I realized that, just like the last time I brought home a stack of quilting books from the library, I had nothing but a useless pile of ancient dreck. One book was all pretty with the promise of fat quarter quilts, but each quilt was just a collection of traditional blocks. One book touted some revolutionary method for sewing strips into tubes and then cutting them up in funky ways, but the instructions were totally incomprehensible (of course, I was trying to keep two small children from coming to blows over a bottle of peel-off glitter nail polish at the time I was trying to read it, but still). Other books expected me to trace patterns onto plastic, and then outline them on fabric AND CUT THEM OUT WITH SCISSORS. This is 2010, people, and besides, rotary cutters have been around since the late seventies, effectively making them medieval technology. We should have laser-guided cutting gadgets by now, don't you think?
I am currently working on the sashing for my plane ticket benefactor's quilt, then it will need a border, and I'll be back to the problem of how to quilt it. I hate to mess up a perfectly lovely quilt by doing it myself, but then I really do need to try to do an entire quilt on my own, just so I know I can do it. But I suppose I shouldn't do that kind of experimenting on something meant to give away. "Here you go! Yes, it looks like an extremely large wadded up ball of fabric and tangled thread, but it's really a quilt. And I quilted it myself! See, if you can just pry this rat's nest away here a bit - ooh, look out for the needle shards! - you can see that I stippled it within an inch of its life! No mercy - that's my quilting motto!"
On second thought, maybe I should just sell my Wii Fit on eBay.