Keeping Up With the Gretchens: Hand Stitching vs Bernina B990 Invisible Machine Appliqué Experiment for Stonefields Blocks

Good morning and Happy Sunday, everyone!  After my reckless but ultimately successful experiment on my Deco quilt last week (read about it in this post, which I edited and updated after coming back to the quilt and realizing that all was well after all), I decided to conduct another Mad Scientist Experiment on my Stonefields quilt project.  You may have heard of Keeping Up With the Joneses or Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but I'm all about trying to keep up with my blogging friend Gretchen who is cruising through her Stonefields quilt and leaving me behind in the dust!  Just kidding; I am delighted that Gretchen, Chris, and Hanne were all successfully cajoled into starting or resuming their Stonefields quilts (pattern by Susan Smith available here) as a very informal quilt along with me.  I know it's not a race, but I must be the slowest stitcher ever to have threaded a needle and it can be discouraging to put in so many hours and see so little progress -- especially since there are so many challenging and intense quilts that I want to make (I am thinking of YOU, Star Upon Stars, Down the Rabbit Hole, Simple Folk, and Happy Days!).  Behold my design wall with Blocks 1-12 completed.  Block 13 is another appliqué block that is prepped and ready for hand stitching in the coming days.  (This post contains affiliate links).

Completed Month One Blocks for Stonefields Quilt, One More to Go

Earlier in the week, out of mild curiosity, I timed how long it took me to stitch the 3 1/2" diameter cheddar print circle in one of my Pomegranate blocks.  Wanna take a guess?  

Hand Stitching a Pomegranate Block for Stonefields

It took one hour and seven minutes for me to stitch down that circle.  That was uninterrupted continuous stitching, not including threading the needle, trimming away the backing fabric, and not including stitching the light blue orange peel shape that I've started on in the photo.  No wonder I'm not able to keep up!  I am the snail of stitching!  

Reckless Quilting: What If I Rip My Custom Quilt Off the Frame, Dump It On the Pool Table, and Try to Put It Back On Later?

Reckless driving is driving with a "willful or wanton disregard for the safety of people or property," as defined by Florida Statute 316.192. Examples include high-speed driving, swerving, unsafe lane changes, and fleeing a law enforcement officer.  Reckless QUILTING is deciding on a whim to conduct an experiment on a quilt that you've been working on (and striving for perfection on) for nearly four years.  Friends, I admit it: I am a Reckless Quilter, guilty as charged.

When one of my longtime clients reached out to me recently to ask whether I could possibly quilt this 40" x 42" baby quilt in time for her granddaughter's birthday, I had already loaded my Deco quilt for custom quilting but I was procrastinating getting started.  I actually agreed to do this baby quilt for Carrie in order to "light a fire under my behind" and force myself to get my Deco quilt either finished, or lightly quilted from top to bottom with enough stabilization and basting to secure all three layers so I could safely zip it off my frame (my Bernina long arm frame has zippered leaders for just this purpose) and zip on another set of leaders for the baby quilt.  

Carrie's 40 x 42 Strawberries Baby Quilt

But alas -- the time came when I needed to get the baby quilt on the frame and, since I had indulged myself by doing some decorative quilting as I went along instead of sticking to boring stitch in the ditch as planned, my Deco quilt only had quilting securing the three layers for the top third of the quilt, with the quilt top, batting and backing loose for the bottom two thirds of the quilt.  What would happen if I took the quilt off the frame just the way it was, I wondered?  Would I be able to get it loaded again afterwards and complete the custom quilting without any issues?  I consulted the Internet, and the Internet had no answers for me.

HYPOTHESIS: 

If a custom quilt in progress is attached to a long arm quilting frame with zipper leaders, and if it is possible to remove and reattach a basted quilt using these zipper leaders, then I should be able to remove and reattach a partially quilted, UNbasted quilt with the zipper leaders.

So I unzipped all three leaders, carried the monster quilt-in-progress over to the pool table in the room next to my studio, and dumped it there for about four or five hours while I loaded and quilted the little baby quilt with an edge-to-edge design.

Yes, I Ripped My Deco Quilt Off the Frame and Dumped It On the Pool Table

Stonefields Applique Prepped, Blocks 5-13 + Applipops vs Perfect Circle Templates

Good morning, my lovelies!  I have been having so much fun prepping my Stonefields Month One appliqué blocks this week!  You know, digging through scrap bins and working with scissors and something suspiciously similar to Elmer's School Glue to put these little blocks together makes me feel like I've been transported across space and time back to kindergarten arts and crafts.  It's magical and so cathartic.  If you are someone who admires appliqué from a distance but thinks "I'd never have the patience," I urge you to give it a try sometime.  It is so much like those school projects from decades ago where we dug through old catalogs and wallpaper sample books and construction paper scraps from other projects, cutting things out with our safety scissors (we were fussy cutting!) and trying to eat the paste when the teacher wasn't looking.  I know of no other pastime that can make me forget my arthritis and my wrinkles, dissolve all the cares of the world, and make me feel like a 5-year-old again.

Here are my Stonefields Blocks 5-13, prepped and ready for stitching:

Stonefields Blocks 5-13, Prepped and Ready to Stitch

When I say that my blocks are "prepped and ready for stitching," I mean that I've made heat resistant plastic templates for all of the applique shapes, selected the fabrics, traced the shapes onto the wrong side of my fabric scraps with a pencil, cut the shapes out with an eyeballed scant 1/4" turning allowance, and preturned those seam allowance/turning allowances by wetting them with starch and pressing them back over the edges of the heat resistant templates.  Then I used the pattern sheets and a light box to position the applique shapes on my background fabric and basted them in place temporarily using tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue Baste-It (this post contains affiliate links).  I put those drops of glue about an eighth to a sixteenth inside the edge of the patch so I won't be hand stitching through the glue.  By the way, this preparatory process is exactly the same regardless of whether I was planning to stitch the shapes down by hand or with my sewing machine using an invisible appliqué stitch.  If sewing by machine I would just need to slip scraps of tearaway embroidery stabilizer beneath each block before stitching to prevent puckering.  I'm not going to promise that there won't be any machine stitched applique on this quilt, but for now I'm going to stitch my applique by hand using my favorite YLI 100 wt Silk thread and my Bohin size 12 Applique Needles.  I love how these thin needles and thread create truly invisible stitches that just sink into my fabric and disappear.

A Spoonful of Sugar, A Capful of Starch + Quilting That Is More Fun Than Stitch In the Ditch

Well, my plan was to complete all of the SID (Stitch In the Ditch) quilting throughout the entirety of my 102" x 102" Deco quilt before starting to quilt the fancy designs.  Instead, I got this wild Mary Poppins idea in my head about how a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and it probably wouldn't hurt to quilt just a few fancy designs on my quilt before I advanced to SID the next row, just to see what they will look like...

Finally Some Quilting I Can See!

In hindsight, the designs I stitched in the light blue squares are more densely quilted than I had intended.  I knew this 10% into stitching the first one, and I could have stopped the machine right then, picked out those stitches, and chosen a less dense, faster stitching design.  But I didn't want to spend 30 minutes picking out those stitches.  Now I'll have to quilt the rest of the behemoth of a quilt more densely to balance it out, which will take an extra hundred hours or so...  😳. I have a very peculiar and inefficient laziness whereby avoiding work creates much more work.  Anyway, it's gratifying to see some quilting texture on this quilt.   As this is a bed quilt and I want it to finish softer than cardboard, I"m using 50 wt matte polyester So Fine thread in my needle paired with MagnaGlide 60 wt thread in my bobbin.  This is going to take forever...  Wicked thought: What if I just CUT THE QUILT OFF at the bottom of this row, and instead of a bed quilt it can be a TABLE RUNNER?!  

Here's how those designs look in the setting triangles across the top of the quilt stitched in contrasting Teal thread against the solid Indigo background fabric:

Setting Triangles Quilted in So Fine Thread, Color Teal Against Indigo Fabric

All day today and yesterday, in between forced frisbee outings with His Little Highness the Dog, I was working on my Deco quilt.  But wait -- there's more!  A few days ago, I started prepping appliqué for my Stonefields quilt!

Grunt Work: SID Quilting on Deco + Appliqué Prep for Stonefields

Welcome to today's boring blog post.  I'm bored already and I am the one writing it -- not a good sign, but let's begin.

😂.  Clearly I was not in a good mood when I started writing this blog post yesterday!  Good thing I left it in Draft mode or I might have driven all of you away for good!  The blog post begun with a bad attitude yesterday and revised with a better attitude today is about not-so-glamorous prep work at the front end of a project that lays the foundation for smooth sailing and a successful finish.  It's like stretching in the morning or flossing your teeth before you go to bed -- you can skip this stuff if you want to, but you'll probably pay for it later if you do!  I'll be talking about the foundational stitch-in-the-ditch quilting on my Deco quilt as well as getting my appliqué templates ready for my next Stonefields quilt blocks.  

Quilting Begins on My Deco Quilt

I Loathe the Drudgery of Stitching In the Ditch Quilting!

Stitching in the ditch -- quilting along patchwork seamlines -- is utter and abysmal drudgery.  If you do it really well, you can't see the quilting at all and sometimes that results in quilting over a line you already stitched because you couldn't see it.  But if you wobble or some speck of thread or bit of gook on your carriage wheels creates a hiccup in your straight line of quilting, it will stick out at you like Pinnochio's nose or a lump on the noggin of the Wylie Coyote.  And right now I DO have something somewhere that is giving me grief.  I wish I'd done a thorough cleaning of my carriage wheels before I loaded this quilt because it's really hard to get to all of them with a quilt on the frame.  It could also be that one of the machine's cables is catching on something at the back of the frame and needs adjusting, but I can't see what's going on back there when I'm quilting manually from the front of the frame and Bernie has been too busy lately to help me troubleshoot.  

Here's a block in the top row before the ditch quilting:

Not Quilted Yet

Below, I have outlined all of the green squares with stitching in the ditch.  Do you see those couple of wobble bumps?  Those are happening when I feel my machine catching on something ever so slightly.  I am stitching very slowly and using a straight edge quilting ruler as a guide, but then suddenly the machine gets knocked away from my ruler edge by some microscopic obstruction and Bad Words come out of my mouth.  For now I am just ignoring it and soldiering on.  Every imperfection is glaring when the quilt is on the frame under the bright lights and I am hyperfocused on every stitch.  Much of what looks like a catastrophe in the moment ends up not being a big deal in the end, and anything that is STILL a catastrophe at the end can be ripped out and restitched if it still drives me crazy.

I'm using Aurifil monofilament thread in color Smoke (this post contains affiliate links) with Fil-Tec MagnaGlide Classic 60 wt navy bobbin thread, in case anyone is interested.  If you can't find MagnaGlide Classic, it doesn't come in the color you need, or your machine can't accept prewound bobbins, Superior's 60 wt Bottom Line or Microquilter would be good alternatives.  You can even wind monofilament on your bobbin but beware -- it's prone to stretching so slow your bobbin winding speed way down, only wind your bobbin half full, and recognize that with invisible thread top and bottom it will be much more difficult to monitor your tension throughout the quilting process.  Those are the reasons I prefer not to use monofilament thread in my bobbin even though it works beautifully in my Berninas.  Oh, and I'm also using Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 Black batting. I know that if/when I wash this quilt, the needle holes will close up and my imperfections will be less visible.  You don't see the monofilament thread against my green fabric, but you do see tiny specks of black batting in the needle holes if you put your nose right up to the quilt and you have your strongest reading glasses on your face.  Ask me how I know this.  👀

SID Finished (Sloppily) Around Green Squares

I deliberately did not SID the seams between navy patches within those blocks because I want to deemphasize those seams and do some other quilting in those areas to make the background recede and the green squares pop forward.  These are vague plans half formed in my mind; I won't decide for sure until after I see how my digital designs look stitched out.

My big, boring accomplishment for this week is that I have done this SID quilting to all of the green and navy blocks across the top row of the quilt.  I think I am going to rip off my ruler base tomorrow and start stitching the digital designs in the setting triangles between these blocks, because I am hoping that will cheer me up and distract me from my wobbly SID quilting.  Imaginary Judge's comments: "Straight lines should be straight."  Duh.  My dog thinks it looks awesome, so there!  ;-)