I haven't yet found peace with modern quilting. Don't get me wrong. I love the piecing part of modern quilting. It is the actual quilting part that I'm trying to define for myself.

This is Kathy's modern quilt for her daughter that she asked me to finish for her. I really like the piecing pattern. I really like the curved rectangular blocks. I really, really, really love all the open quilting space.

But then... lines. Rows and rows and rows of lines. Side by side. Just lying there being all liney and what not. Kathy specifically asked me to do this channel quilting. She wanted it done exactly like it was shown in the Modern Quilts from the Blogging Universe Book by Martingale. Easy peasy to do with my Millennium especially with the electronic channel locks. I just turn them on and walk down the quilt. Back and forth and forth and back. As a longarm quilter this kind of quilting does zero for me aesthetically. If I were working on a sit down domestic and I needed an effective quilting design using my walking foot because I was limited by throat space, straight line quilting would be the absolute best answer. But I'm not limited in that way. I have 26" of throat space on my machine. I guess I'm just not feelin' it.

I know the other end of the modern quilt world has dense filler designs that melt into one another and are all freehand but sometimes that density level is just too much for a quilt. Plus, when I have a customer request that style and I tell them how much it will cost they fall over. Super dense modern fillers, like pebbles for example, are extremely time consuming. I'm not sure what the answer is for me. I know I'm picking away at it in my brain. I want a less dense modern quilting approach that has variety and interest. I'm just not sure what that is yet. I think as we've seen modern quilts evolve in their piecing, we'll see the same thing start to happen in the actual quilting of those quilts. What do you think? Do you believe modern quilting has some evolution to go through on the actual quilting side of things? Where do you think that side of the movement is headed?