In April of 2005, after hand quilting for others for 25 years, I happened into a local fabric store and spied an HQ16 midarm machine. I’d seen longarm quilting machines before and had decided that they were forever out of my reach. The first thing I did was ask the sales person “Can I drive that thing?” She chuckled and proceeded to walk me through the process. Two weeks later, I purchased that machine and in May of 2005, *da beast* came to live at our house. I was so excited about it and it did not disappoint my expectations. Finally, I could think about being able to finish all those quilts rolling around in my head, instead of it taking 60 hours to hand quilt a queen sized quilt! After about 3 months of daily practice, I started getting phone calls from friends, asking if I could quilt their quilts. This wasn’t a new idea to me because I’d been doing that for 25 years so I happily started quilting for others.

In May of 2006, I was introduced to MQS via the yahoo quilting groups and off we went. Handi Quilter had a reception for HQ16 owners and oh what fun that proved to be! Besides getting a chance to meet the creator of the HQ16, my husband and I had a chance to meet Mark Hyland, Amy and Greg! To top the evening off, I won one of the door prizes, which was an all expenses paid trip to Utah for a U of HQ session of my choice! Woohoo!! The Intermediate session in Utah with the Handi Quilter folks, introduced me to Suzanne Hyland, Vicki and Hattie. Everyone in the class had a great time and learned a lot! I will always be grateful for the opportunity Handi Quilter gave me to learn their machines from their educators. With all this fuel for my passion, I was ready and willing to go back and explore more people’s quilts and was quilting about 6 hours a day. Da Beast had no trouble keeping up with me.

In 2006, a friend honored me with her request that I design and execute the quilting for a piece that was going into the AQS Museum competition that year. I’m not normally much of a competitor but I loved the quilt and agreed to do it. It was one of the 12 Finalists and traveled with the AQS shows for a couple of years. It was published in the AQS book entitled Rose of Sharon New Quilts from an Old Favorite. The name of the quilt is Cracklin’ Rosie. I’ve also had the privilege of teaching and growing with a group of about 12 ladies (a good number of them also HQ16 owners) once a month, for the past year.

This past spring, during a trip to the quilt show in Rosemont, IL, I had an unexpected chance to see and *test drive* the HQ Fusion. Handi Quilter has totally outdone themselves with this machine! With special pricing available for the first few months of its debut, I set about instantly trying to find a way to have this machine come and play in my home. Because I knew first hand, both the people involved in Handi Quilter, and a great deal about their previous equipment and the quality of their customer service, I had no qualms about ordering this machine so soon after it hit the market. In May of this year, I took delivery on a new Fusion. What a treat it has been. Faster, stronger and smoother, it comes on its own beefier studio frame. I’m happy to report that *Big Brother* is doing quite well and I am enjoying the extra quilting space, the added strength, the steadiness of the new frame and the very fun feature of the ability to listen to audio books and movies on the touch screen. These are only a few of the features too numerous to mention and I’m enjoying every one of them!

With approximately 200 quilts done on Handi Quilter machines, I can (and do, as often as opportunity presents itself!) attest to their quality. The machine is well built, extremely well priced, very user friendly and just plain fun! Thank you Handi Quilter for your great products, your great customer service and now for a chance to tell my story!

I own the following HQ machines: