Let the Sun Shine SID

Hi all -

I'm starting to get my mojo back now that I've made a reservation for some time on a longarm to baste my sister's wedding quilt. My appointment isn't until Tuesday of next week, so I have some time to work on some other stuff. There's a place that rents time that's only 45 minutes from my house, but I called them and they wanted me to take a $120 class before being able to use their longarm. Well, that seemed a bit excessive to me so I called the place that is a couple of hours away and they just charge $15/hr and that includes support and instruction, if needed. Much better deal! So I asked for a couple of hours and I'll take a day off of work to head up there and baste as many quilts as I can before I run out of time, water-soluable thread or quilts. I have 4 quilts all prepared, just in case.

So, to pass the time until then, I decided to pull out my "Let the Sun Shine" wallhanging and start the quilting. I pieced this wallhanging a year or two ago along with some other TQSers from a pattern by Jacqueline de Jonge. I can't seem to find the pattern right now so I don't know the name, but we all did the piecing when TQS had her video available for us. Here is a picture of my quilt top:

I really love how the top sparkles with the scrappy fabrics! I had started a plan for the quilting a while ago and have really been itching to quilt this one. For smaller quilts, it's really nice to just trace the quilt components on paper to give myself a platform for testing out design ideas. I just do a quick tracking of the quilt in pen, then add ideas in pencil so I can erase what I don't like:

I don't have all of the quilting planned out, but I needed enough done so I would know what marking I would need to do before layering and basting the quilt. The small areas I can do without marking, but I really needed to mark the brackets before beginning. I was hoping that I could just use a lightbox to mark the lines, but the fabrics were just too dark to see the lines well enough, even after going over them with a thin sharpie. A thick sharpie would have worked better, but I wanted more precision in the lines so I had to come up with something else. My solution was to mark the lines on some cardstock and cut the edges to create a stencil. This worked really well. The cardstock was thin enough that I could see the lines well using the lightbox, so tracing was easy. Then I just cut along the edges. Here are the stencils for the small bracket to give you a better idea of what I did:

I made marks at the points where the stencil would line up with the piecing so I could get everything as consistent as possible. Here are the stencils stacked to give you an idea of how they go together:

And here are the small brackets marked on the quilt:

I used Clover's white marker since the lines are visible on the dark fabric and I've never had trouble getting these lines out. The brackets in the background were larger so I had to make the stencils just for one side of the bracket:

In this case, the marks indicated where the stencil lines up with the piecing and with a diagonal line marked on the quilt. I had to flip the stencils to mark the two sides of the bracket. Again, this is how the stencils would line up:

And the markings on the quilt:

Even though I haven't chosen all of the designs, I'm sure everything else will be able to be quilted free-hand or with registration marks that will be easy to put on the basted quilt. I'll still use the quilting plan from above to try out the designs as I make my decisions.

So I got the quilt basted and finished the initial SID quilting. I'm using two layers of batting: a cotton batting on the bottom for stability and a wool batting on top for definition. It's a little harder to quilt with all that puff, but it's worth it in the end. I used invisible thread on top and SoFine in the bobbin for the SID. I used to have trouble using the invisible thread, until I figured out this set-up which makes it work perfectly for me now:

What you see is a spool of Superior's Monopoly thread with a thread net around it. The thread is then run through a packing peanut, up through the hole in the thread stand, then through another packing peanut before going through the guide at the top of the stand and then normal threading through the machine. For some reason, Superior puts their thread on a really heavy spool, so if you put it on the top of your machine the thread will stretch as it tries to turn the spool, so you really have to keep it off the back of the machine. The thread net keeps the thread from unwinding from the spool and tangling. The packing peanuts keep the thread from kinking up on itself. I also loosen the top tension a little bit (I was using 3.5 on my machine) and then the thread runs like butter through the machine.

Because the curves in the top are fairly flat, I was able to do all of the SID quilting using my walking foot. It was still tedious, as SID always is, but it really is important to highlight the piecing in the quilt. Here is the top with the SID finished:

 And here is the back where you can see the quilting better:

 I sewed around the outside edge and trimmed the batting a bit to try to reduce all of the fluff that I get all over my gloves and the quilt while quilting with the wool batting. Once I figure out how I want to quilt the outer border, I'll get that done and get the binding on so the fluff will go away completely. But until then, I'll keep plugging away at the quilting that I've decided on already.

Nancy

Bird Song

Hi all -

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. I keep hoping to post weekly, but I'm not accomplishing much right now so I keep putting it off. I'll try to be better!

First, the good news. I got an email yesterday letting me know that Tea for Two won a ribbon at Houston! I'm stunned and thrilled!! I won't know exactly what I won until awards night, but it doesn't really matter since I will cherish any ribbon that they decide to give to me!! And my friend Janet Stone won a ribbon for one quilt and one of the big prizes for her other quilt. And my friend Peggy Kragnes won a ribbon for her quilt. I'm hoping that other friends have won, too, but that's all I've heard about so far. It's so exciting being a part of this impressively talented group and I can't wait to see how everybody did! I'll be attending the awards ceremony for the first time, so Janet warned me that I'll have to find some nicer clothes to wear. She knows my standard wear is shorts and a T-shirt, so she didn't want me to be embarrassed when I get my picture taken on stage. Thank you!! I'll share the whole experience with you after the show in early November.

Now on to my current projects. My latest accomplishment was finishing the background quilting on Bird Song, the little quilt I started in my twilling class at the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival this summer. As a reminder, here is a picture of the finished quilt;

 If you want more information, you can see my previous post about this quilt here.

The last time I showed you this piece, I had echo quilted around the twilling in the middle, but had left the rest of the center unquilted. I had also quilted the borders and added the binding so I could think about how to finish the center. The first thing I was worried about in the center was that the echo quilting was 1/4" from the edges of the twilling. I had to do this because the twilling stitches are very thick so I couldn't run my darning foot over them. But the bird and tree branch were just too big to leave without more quilting so I had to come up with a way to quilt closer to the stitching.

I started looking at the different FMQ feet available for the Bernina, but none of them seemed like they would work for this. Then it dawned on me that I might be able to use my regular FMQ foot and move the needle over to the right to get closer the the edge of the foot. But as I thought about this, I didn't think that it would work in the tight areas and I really wanted to get closer to the stitching that this would allow. I wanted my stitching to run right up against the outside edges of the twilling. So back to the drawing board.

Then it dawned on me that I didn't need to use a free-motion foot for this. I have several regular feed that have space on the bottom for things like couching. So I looked through my feet and started with the #12 foot. This is a metal foot with a really big arch on the bottom that works great with couching and piping.

I put it on and gave it a try and it worked really well except that I could see where I was going. I had to stop every few stitches and raise the presser foot to make sure I was staying on course.

So I decided to try my #23 foot. This foot has a cut-out on the bottom, but it's not nearly as deep as the arch in the #12 foot. But the bottom of this foot is clear so I could see exactly where I was going. Here's how it looked on the machine:

I was very pleased with how this foot worked, but I was a little uncomfortable with how it smashed the twilling a bit,especially in places where the stitching intersected with other stitching.

Then I made a trip to my Bernina shop and picked up some other feet that I'd been wanting, including the #44C free-motion echoing foot. I'm really bad at echo quilting so wanted this foot to see if it would help me improve. After I got home, I realized that this was probably also the perfect foot for going around my twilling. The bottom of this foot is a clear circle with raised edges. The raised edges would allow the foot to float over the twilling. I tried it and it was perfect:

It really does pay to collect feet! It's hard to see the stitching next to the twilling, but here's a close-up to hopefully give you an idea:

Finally, I had to do some background quilting to tack everything down and make the stitching stand out. I've been wanting to try Nemeshing, a really cool background fill invented by Bethanne Nemesh. If interested, you can see her book here. This fill is made up of sprigs of classic and fanciful feathers, optionally surrounded by a tighter background fill. It's funny, but what attracted me most to her Nemeshing was the way she did her pebbles, where she periodically threw in some much larger pebbles. I'd always done my pebbles with varying sizes, but my variations were smaller -- just enough to make them more organic. But throwing in those larger pebbles really gives them some pop. And having the feathers really speeds up the quilting while adding that extra interest. My background was kind of oddly shaped so I had trouble fitting the feathers in nicely, but I still really like how it turned out:

And I was really happy that this evening's lighting was perfect to see the quilting because it's really hard to see with the white thread on the white background! Just to be complete, here's a picture of the back with the hanging sleeve:

I'll add the label later. The software the I used to use for creating labels on my old computer (Greeting Card Factory) was bought out by Hallmark and I just recently bought the latest version to use on my newer computer. I played with it a little bit but don't like the new interface. It looks like you can't zoom in to see your images at their actual size so it's going to be frustrating getting things sized appropriately, but I'll persist and figure something out soon so I can get my latest quilts labelled. It's really nice to have this one done!

I also spent a bit of time trying to baste my sister's wedding quilt so I can start the quilting. I just can't seem to force myself to do the pin-basting even though I've done this many times on all my other quilts. I guess I'm just getting too old to crawl around on the floor! So I thought I should baste it using water-soluable thread on my HQ16. Those of you who don't know me might not know that I have this machine. I bought it over 10 years ago and back then they just dumped the pieces on your doorstep and you had to put it together. Anyway, long story short, my machine is not easy to use because the table is pretty bad and I haven't had the time to spend figuring out how to fix everything up right. Sounds silly, but I'll really need to dedicate some time to get things working better and I'm not ready to do that yet. So, I decided to get the quilt that's been sitting on that machine for a very long time quilted to the point were I could take it off the frame, then load my sister's quilt and get it basted. I finished the quilting and unloaded the quilt. Then ran into another snag. Even though I have my HQ16 set up with the queen-sized table, bars and leaders, it turns out that my quilt is an over-sized queen so it didn't fit on the leaders. Guess it pays to measure! But it didn't dawn on me that this would be a problem. And I don't have room to add the last piece of the table to make it king-sized. Back to the drawing board..... My next thought was to load the quilt anyway and just baste the middle, either pin-basting or reloading to get the sides done. That was another bad idea. Even though I only had 8-10 inches of extra backing on each side of the leader, the extra fabric kept me from being able to roll the back on the bars evenly, so that just wasn't going to work. My current plan is to call the local Bernina shop and see if they are ready to start renting time on their new longarm yet and just take it there to do the basting. Wish me luck!!

Finally, when going through these times of low motivation, I tend to watch a lot of Craftsy classes. I own and watch a lot of classes and often only get small ideas from each, but I still find them enjoyable. However, I came across a new class that really kept me riveted and has me wanting to try a bunch of new techniques. The class is called Stitch Savvy by Lynda Faires. OMG! The things she has figured out how to do with a sewing machine! I haven't tried any of the techniques yet, but I did start on my stitch dictionary:

These are the stitches from just one folder on my new machine. I have MANY more stitches to go, not to mention being able to mirror image and combine them into other stitches. Amazing! I happened to sign up for her Artist's Bag class in Houston before even trying this class, so I'm really looking forward to that now!

Well, that pretty much covers what I've been doing lately. I'll leave you with just one more picture:

Does this seem like a bad idea to any of the rest of you? Luckily in this case the iron was unplugged. Yesterday I caught her laying just a couple of inches away from the hot iron. I'm not sure how to teach the kitties to stay off of the pressing table. I might have to start putting the Scat Mat on the table when I'm not using it. We'll see if this gets to be a bigger problem......

Nancy

Colors of Velvet

Hi all -

I've finished my thread wreath color wheel. Except, of course, the final naming and putting on the label. My current thought is "Colors of Velvet", but I'll live with it for a little while before I make the final decision. Don't want to rush into anything as important as a name! ;)

If you remember, this wallhanging started as my July FMQ Challenge pillow, but turned into a wallhanging when I realized that I wasn't going to finish it in time anyway. The earlier work on this quilt is described here. At that point I had the colorful wreath quilted. After quilting the wreath, I added a gray echo line around the wreath to give it some unity and quilted the corner plumes in the same gray. I decided to leave the centers of the corner plumes unquilted so that they would puff out.

For the background quilting I used a dark purplish blue Kimono silk thread. I got the idea of using this color from one of my favorite quilting Web sites, Machine Quilter's Resource. The dark blue/purple is easier to see while you're doing the quilting and adds a very subtle sparkle to the background. I liked how that worked out. For the background in the center of the wreath, I just did echo lines. I'm not that pleased with them, but they aren't that noticeable so it doesn't really matter. For the rest of the background, I quilted parallel straight lines. I had to quilt the lines 1/8" apart to match the quilting density in the wreath and get the quilt to lie flat. Here's how it looked after completing the quilting:

Now to finish the edges. I need to try other edge techniques besides binding, so for this piece I decided to try a piped facing. And to make it even more interesting, I decided to use a solid gray fabric with stitched colored threads on it for the piping. For the piping, I would fabric strips cut on the bias. I didn't want to stitch a lot more fabric than I would use, so I cut a bias strip of fabric about 8.5" wide. I figured I could get 4 strips of 1.75" fabric out of that for the piping. When I'm cutting fabric on the bias, what I do is fold the yardage so that the cut edge is even with one of the selvedges:

The folded edge will be approximately along the 45 degree bias, and, really, with bias close is good enough. There's really not much difference in the stretch of a 45 degree edge and the stretch of a 50 degree edge. Then I very carefully press the folded edge, being very careful not to stretch anything:

It's the pressing that really makes this long edge usable. I don't know if you can tell in the pictures, but the edge before it's pressed is really puffy and hard to deal with. Once it dawned on me to press this edge (took me a long time to come up with that!), this method became easy and I don't avoid bias strips anymore. Now I can just fold the fabric to give me a manageable length and cut off the folded edge to get the first side of my bias strip:

I happen to have a longer ruler that I can use to cut this edge with the single fold. Before I got this ruler, I would use my 24" ruler and make a second fold so the fabric would fit under the ruler. This is a little fiddly to make sure the edge is completely straight, but really isn't too bad. And in most places where you use bias strips (binding, piping), it doesn't really matter if you get a little bit of a wiggle in your cut.

Now for all of the tedious stitching. I tried starching the fabric but couldn't get it stiff enough to stand up to the stitching, so I ended up using a stabilizer instead. I have a roll of Floriana tear-away/wash-away stabilizer that I thought would be perfect. That way, I don't really need to pull out the stabilizer after the stitching. I pinned the stabilizer on the bottom of the fabric and just started stitching:

And stitching, and stitching, and stitching.....

I must say, I've very good at threading my machine now! I had to change the top thread for each line of stitching because I knew that if I tried to do all of the red lines first I would never get things evenly spaced. At least I could use a gray thread in the bobbin so that didn't have to be changed.

Now it was time to make the piping. I decided to leave all of the stabilizer in because I didn't want to pull out the stitching while trying to tear out the stabilizer. I was worried that this would make the fabric too stiff to deal with, but it really worked out well. I used a thicker cording that I had since this piping was going around the outside edge of the quilt. I thought about using a single length of piping around the perimeter of the quilt, but I know that it's hard to get very square corners that way, so I decided to try something different and made individual lengths of piping for each side of the quilt. Here's the prepared piping (or at least 3 of them, the 4th was already on the quilt when I took the picture):

I sewed a piece along each edge, overlapping the piping at the corners. Then I pulled out the stitches down to where the two pipings met and lined them up in the corner like this (sorry I didn't get a picture before trimming):

I stitched across the pipings in the corners to hold them in place before trimming. Here's the whole quilt with the piping attached:

Then I just made a facing and put that on top. I stitched it on from the back, like Susan Cleveland teaches. Then turned the facing to the back, pressed everything in place and hand stitched it in place. Here is how it turned out:

And here's what the corner looks like:

Not the best look, but it's still okay. I might decide to put some sort of embellishment in the corners later on if the corners bother me.

Here's a picture of the back with the colorful hanging sleeve:

 And a close-up of some of the quilting:

I really love how this turned out. I love the colors in the wreath and the background straight-line quilting creates a really cool texture. At first my friend thought it was corduroy and then she said it reminded her of a velvet Elvis, so I wanted to include "velvet" in the quilt name. I also love the puffiness of the plumes in the corners.

That's all for now. I'll move on to another project and let you know how that goes.

Nancy

Chalkboard

Hi all -

I continue to play with little things, putting off basting my sister's wedding quilt that has to be done by Christmas. Yep, I hate basting the big quilts so I'll do anything to put that off. But I promise I'll start it soon.....

So, instead I decided to go ahead and make this month's Superior University project, which is a little chalkboard with that chalkboard fabric. It's not something that I would have made on my own, but it was a fun little project that I think might end up being useful. The kit had the chalkboard fabric, a thick heavyweight stabilizer that I hadn't seen before (Pellon 71F), a little piece of elastic for making a chalk holder and a couple of spools of quilting thread. I just had to supply the fabric and a little piece of lightweight stabilizer. I like that these kits have small amounts of things that you might not play with much and so don't want to buy a large amount of, like the chalkboard fabric.

It was a simple pattern where you just fuse the heavyweight stabilizer to the center of the wrong side of the fabric. Then you fold the edges of the fabric around to the front and put the chalkboard fabric in the middle. So the fabric makes a frame around the chalkboard and you slide the elastic pieces under the bottom of the frame to make the chalk holder. I went ahead and sewed around the opening and along the miters in the corners with a matching thread and a narrow zigzag to hold everything in place.

Now for the fun part -- playing with the decorative stitches on my new machine! I started with a scalloped floral stitch around the inside of the frame:

I really liked how this looked! The corners even came out okay, even though I just sewed to the corner and turned the piece when it looked like I was in the right place. Here it is with just that first line of stitching:

But one line of stitching is never enough! I decided that the next stitching should be a boxy stitch and should be closer to the center than to the outside. I took a couple of pictures after this step, but they didn't come out for some reason. It seemed that the green I used being next to the black of the chalkboard fabric caused the camera to have difficulty getting the image. I would put the chalkboard on the floor in a shaded area and everything would look good to me, but then I would point the camera at it and the image would get all washed out like it was in bright sunlight. Interesting!

For the final line of stitching, I decided on a more complicated straight-line design. This one when right around the outside edge and was also used to secure the pocket on the back of the board:

(I went to a darker area of the house to get this picture.) Here's a close-up of some of the stitching:

And here's the back with the pocket:

I used another fancy stitch on the edge of the pocket. Unfortunately, it didn't show up as well as I had hoped with the stars in the fabric:

It was so much fun to play with the decorative stitches! I've never had a machine with this much variety before. And along with the stitches, this machine has a bunch of ways to combine and alter the stitches, so I have a lot to play with!

I'm thinking that this chalkboard will be useful by my cutting table so I can write down temporary notes about what I'm doing. Currently, I do that with post-it notes, but that's pretty wasteful. Here it is on the wall by my cutting table:

Pretty nice, huh? Now I just have to get some chalk.

Nancy

Name Tag Bags

Hi all -

My latest project has been to make a set of name tag bags for myself and my two Sew Day friends who are also going to Houston. Here are the bags that I made:

They are from the "To Market, To Market Tote & Tag" pattern by Patterns by Annie.

I found the pattern to be pretty straightforward, although I kept making mistakes on the first one since I had a different construction in my head than what she had in the pattern. The one place where I thought the instructions were lacking was where the instructions describe how to put together the strap with the hardware. The written instructions didn't make any sense to me at all. In the instructions, Annie points you to a video on her web site, but that video is for a strap that doesn't have all of the hardware that this one has. I think the instructions could greatly benefit from some drawings for this step. But the video did give me enough of a hint that I was able to work the rest of it out myself.

The only change I made from the pattern was that I decided make the bag just using fabrics stabilized with DecorBond. The instructions tell you to quilt the pieces using either Soft and Stable or regular batting. I thought this would make the bags too thick and ungainly. The bags with the DecorBond are still fairly thick, so I think I made the correct choice.

The first bag I made is for myself and I decided to use Kaffe Fassett fabrics. Here is the front:

You can see there's a vinyl pocket for the name tag and a little zippered pocket for money or whatever. And zippered pocket is on a flap that opens up to reveal a larger pocket inside:

On the back there's another pocket:

The second bag is for my friend Cathy. The choice of fabrics was pretty easy since she is very fond of chickens:

Can you tell that the red fabric actually has little yellow chicks on it? On the inside you can see the chicken wire lining fabric I used:

And on the back her pocket has the addition of some sewn slots for holding pens (hard to see in the picture since the thread is black and blends in with the fabric). I couldn't do that on mine since I got confused and put things together in the wrong order.

It was a little harder for me to decide on the fabrics for Cindy's bag. Cindy doesn't really have a motif that she collects. She's an art quilter and has made some really cool butterfly and moth quilts, so I decided to go with butterflies:

The inside:

And the back:

I really fell in love with this fabric combination while I was making the bag so I'm going to have to think about a quilt for them. Unfortunately, I don't have much of this gray, which I really love, but other grays will be nice, too.

Nancy

New Sewing Machine & Table

Hi all -

I finally have the new sewing machine and table. My new machine is the Bernina 770QE and I bought a Koala table for it. I got the sewing machine at the end of June, but it took another 4-6 weeks for the table to come in so I've just been using it on my kitchen table. My new table arrived on Tuesday and now everything is set up. Here it is when I first got the machine into the table:

And a view from the side:

You see where Lance is laying? That's where he likes to lay, so we have a bit of a battle when I'm sewing. He usually wins and I have to adjust my chair around him. At this point I still had to install the shelves and stuff. You can see that when I sew I have a window next to my right elbow. On the sill, I keep the silverware container from my old dishwasher with my sewing supplies in the compartments. The cardboard is there to shade the stuff, like the sewing machine oil, from the hot sunlight. If you look closely at the window just above the cardboard, you'll see a circle. That circle is one of those magnetic scissors holders, another very convenient aspect of the window.

Here is what my sewing area looks like after installing the shelves and moving the pressing table back into position:

And from another angle (before cleaning up the mess):

You can see that my pressing table backs right up to the sewing table and the cutting table is against the next wall. I've found this to be a really convenient set up. I just have to keep the shade down on the window next to the pressing table so the sun doesn't warp my cutting mats.

Of course, nothing is perfect. We had a storm yesterday and the skylight right above the sewing table decided to start leaking. Luckily, the leak was away from the sewing machine so it didn't get wet. Hopefully, I'll be able to find a roofer to come up here and fix that. I live in an area where it's very difficult to find any workmen who'll come up here so this isn't going to be easy. Wish me luck!

Nancy

Classmate Bag

Hi all -

As usual, I got a little side-tracked and made a little bag. For this bag, I used the "Classmate" pattern from Atkinson Designs. This is a pretty cool pattern with a lot of useful pockets. Here's the outside of the bag:

 And the inside:

I thought this might be a fun bag to take to my classes in Houston. If I make this bag again, I think I will probably add a zipper pocket on the outside so I can get at some stuff from the outside without opening the bag. The instructions for this bag were good and it went together quickly.

I've continued to work on my FMQ challenge wallhanging and I might be done with the quilting on that one. I have to look at it for a little while to decide if it needs more. I'll share pictures when that one is finished.

Next week is looking to be a good one. It's my birthday week so I have several fun things planned. First is lunch with some friends on Monday. Then, my new sewing table is going to be delivered on Tuesday. It's coming in right on time, but it sure seems like forever since I ordered it! Then lunch and a movie with a friend on Wednesday, and meeting up with two other friends on Thursday at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Festival. Friday will be a day to spend at home with the pets, skipping work to finish off a wonderful week.

Nancy