Free The Double Cross by Clare O'Donohue

free-motion quilting,” Eleanor said. “The walking foot is for straight-line quilting.”
    Rita looked up at me and wrinkled her nose at the sight of Barney, who had trotted over to say hello. Poor thing. Since he liked everyone, it never occurred to him that someone might not like him.
    “Can he wait outside?” Rita looked at me.
    “He knows his way around a quilt shop,” Eleanor said. Though the words better than you were not spoken, no one missed her meaning.
    Before Rita had a chance to take offense, though, Eleanor put the two quilting feet on a table and sighed.
    “When you finish with your quilt top, you layer it, baste it, and quilt it,” Eleanor said. “If you’re just using straight-line quilting, you use the walking foot because it grips the top layer of the fabric and helps move the quilt evenly under the needle. But if you’re free-motion quilting, the kind where you want to move the quilt up, down, left, or right without any restrictions, you lower the feed dogs—the little teeth that move the bottom of the fabric—and you use a darning foot.” Eleanor paused, waiting to see if Rita understood, but apparently finding no lightbulb over Rita’s head she went on. “This really would be easier if we made a quilt together. Instead of being abstract ideas, they would be practical pieces of information. Quilters really expect an expert when they come into a store like this,” Eleanor said, the frustration evident in her voice. “Much of my day is spent offering advice or troubleshooting for folks. It helps that I’m familiar with the various feet available for machine quilting.”
    “Well, it doesn’t matter because I have that.” Rita pointed to an object the size of a dining room table that was covered with layers of plastic.
    “You have what?” I asked.
    “She bought a long-arm machine and is going to let people use it,” Eleanor told me.
    “It’s for quilting,” Rita said.
    “Yes, I’ve seen them,” I said. “They have frames, sort of like the hand-quilting frames people think of when they think of quilting, but instead you use them with a specially designed machine that allows you to quilt an entire piece in no time.”
    “And this one is all computerized,” Rita explained. “You can set it to a preprogrammed pattern and it will do all the quilting for you.”
    “Cool.” I walked over to get a better look. “We should get one of these for Someday Quilts. We have the room.”
    “We don’t know how to use it,” Eleanor pointed out.
    “So we learn.”
    “I saw it demonstrated by a woman in Lake George,” Rita said. “She’s an expert at the squiggly lines quilting.”
    “Stippling,” Eleanor said, with a tired sigh that obviously came from hours of explaining her passion to a disinterested party.
    “I’d love to learn this,” I said. “I’m terrible at machine quilting. I think it’s because you have to shove half the quilt under the machine and it only has, like, twelve inches of clearance. It’s hard to move a big quilt around. But with one of these babies . . .”
    “They’re nearly the price of a car,” Eleanor said.
    “But if you quilt for other people, or rent time on it, I’ll bet it pays for itself.”
    I could see Rita smiling. Clearly she’d already had the same conversation with Eleanor and lost. Now she’d found an ally, a role I was uncomfortable playing. I backed off from the long-arm machine.
    “It’s quite an investment for your shop,” I said, trying to add a neutral comment to counteract my enthusiasm. But it didn’t work.
    “If you like that, you should see all the other gadgets she’s bought.” Eleanor pointed to a pile of boxes near the back of the shop.
    “I went to a quilt show where they sell just to shops . . . ,” Rita started.
    “Quilt market,” Eleanor and I said together.
    “Yes, and they had amazing things that I knew quilters would love.”
    “How do you know what quilters will love if you don’t quilt?”