Quilt It Til It's Dead

In the interest of time, I don't usually quilt my quilts to death. I find that my "natural" spacing is something between a quarter-inch and half-inch scale. So my quilting is on the dense side but not so dense that it takes me forever to quilt something.

However, I couldn't resist the urge to try dense quilting. I've always admired the look, and I heard that it's not really any harder ... just much more time consuming. So I tried it on this quilt that I'm working on.

All I can say is ... dang! And ... dang! The texture feels great, and it wasn't any harder than quilting less densely. But ... it really takes forever! I started this a week before Christmas, and despite diligently working on it every day, I'm still not close to being finished. Of course, this quilt has the distinction of being 1) the biggest quilt I've ever quilted and 2) 75% of the quilt is negative space. Hopefully I'll have it done in another few weeks.

Though it is a major time suck, I think quilting so densely is definitely worth it for some quilts. I wouldn't do every single one this densely, even if I'd like to, or I'd finish far fewer quilts!