practice makes perfect?

My blogger friend Paulette, was talking about a hint she got to practice machine quilting on paper towel...well I am too stingy to waste a roll of paper towel so I thot of going to the local thrift store and finding placemats...same consistency as a quilt almost and perfect to play with...so when my machine told me that I only had a little bit of thread left in the bobbin, I started playing...man do I suck...but the idea of practice which has not sounded appealing at all before is starting to take shape.
This placemat has lots of practice on it....I didn't care if I was perfect or if I went over what I had already done...just wanted to get a rhythm going...so over and over I played

here is the other side...........one of the nice things I found with this placemat was that there were quilted lines which gave a grid to play with...........ha...my mama didn't raise no fool :)

close up of the hearts I was playing with today

then I needed borders on this...the really cool feather is done by my machine...and the gap is where I needed to bite my nails and fill it in......

here is the second try of putting the machine one together....still a gap but a much smaller gap

altho there are threads everywhere cuz of the way I added the feathers to the program, there was only a little gap which I filled in free hand.......easy peasy...at least on this little gap

not as good on this one where there was a larger area to fill in....and the original machine one was triple stitched so I had to go over the area several times to get the heavier threads........

well...now that my nails are chewed down to the quick I need to trim this quilt and bind it...along with its almost matching one