Quilt Finishes for Ramona and Steffanie: PacMan and Pussy Cats!

Good morning, quilter friends!  I have TWO fabulous clients' quilts to share with you today, both of them stitched in yummy variegated cotton quilting threads.  Since I babbled on and on for way too long about my Kaffe Fassett Skirt Squirrel in my last post, I'll try to be more concise today.  (Famous last words...)

Ramona's PacMan Quilt

Ramona's PacMan Quilt

I finished quilting this for Ramona of Doodlebugs and Rosebuds several weeks ago and I have been dying to share it with you.  Ramona's quilt is a strikingly modern reimagining of the classic Drunkard's Path quilt pattern, and although "PacMan" wasn't the kit name, that's what she and her husband nicknamed the quilt while she was working on it.  

PacMan Detail, Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut Quilting Design

Ramona used Moda Grunge fabrics for her quilt (this post contains affiliate links), and she used this AccuQuilt Drunkard's Path die to quickly and accurately cut out all of those curved pieces.  

Sew and Tell Friday: Drunken Dragons Bed Quilt

So, have you met Amy Lou Who?  This mother, blogger, former school teacher, and creative quilter came up with the bright idea of hosting a Show-and-Tell sewing party on her blog each Friday, inviting others to link up and share sewing projects they had completed during the week.  If you click over to Amy's blog (and I hope you will!), you'll find links to all kinds of cool sewing projects that others have made, everthing from quilts to purses to clothing, and everything in between.  The idea is to motivate one another to follow through and finish projects, to connect with and encourage others who share our creative passions, and of course it's a great source of inspiration for future projects. 

I've been lurking in the background of these Sew and Tell Friday parties for months now without participating -- because I was never finished with anything until now!  So, here it is, folks: Eleven long months after I cut into the first piece of fabric, my Drunken Dragons quilt for my 11-year-old son is finally finished.  If you are a newcomer and are interested in reading any of the long, tedious posts about this quilt that I've been boring my regular readers with for the last year, you can find them all by clicking here.

"Drunken Dragons" Quilt, 66" x 97"

 

My son had been asking for a new bed quilt for over a year when I found a couple of cool Asian dragon fabrics that met with his approval.  The 66" x 97" finished quilt (the quilt top measured 70" x 105" prior to quilting and washing) is comprised of 7" drunkard's path blocks, and some of my early attempts at curved piecing and free-motion quilting were so bad that it looked like the work of a drunkard quilter -- hence the "Drunken Dragons" title for the finished piece.

I quilted a horizontal and vertical grid at the seamlines with my walking foot, used the embroidery module on my sewing machine to quilt a perfect decorative motif in the center of each of the pieced circles, and then I filled in everything else with hours and hours of free-motion squiggles and paisley fills.  The Scrabble label on the back of the quilt was appliqued prior to layering and I quilted right through it.  Here's the quilt on my son's bed at last:

Ta da!  Thanks for letting me share, Amy!

6/28/2016: I'm linking this post up with Archives Tuesday at Val's Quilting Studio.  The theme this week is Four Patch Quilts and my blocks do have a 4x4 grid even if they aren't just squares -- I hope that's okay!  :-)

11 Months Later, Lars's "Drunken Dragons" Quilt is Finally FINISHED!

"Drunken Dragons" Drunkard's Path Quilt for Lars, 66" x 97"

Are you sick of reading about my Drunken Dragons drunkard's path quilt for Lars yet?  Well, good news -- it's FINALLY FINISHED!!  This quilt is my first attempt at piecing curved seams, my first go at free-motion quilting, and the most densely-quilted project I've ever completed.  You can really see the wonderful bumpy-quilty texture from the back side of the quilt, where I appliqued the Scrabble label and then quilted it in. 

Backing Side, with Quilted-In Scrabble Label

The oversized twin quilt top measured 70" x 105" originally, and it finished at 66" x 97" after it was densely quilted and allowed to shrink up in the wash.  The extra length was planned so that the quilt is long enough to tuck under securely at the bottom of my son's extra-thick mattress.

Binding In Progress At Last!

This picture was taken early last week, when I'd just started stitching the backside of the binding by hand.  I had several more evenings of hand stitching ahead of me, and then the quilt went in the washing machine this morning (with a little quilt soap on the gentle cycle) to get rid of the starch, hand lotion, and whatever dust and grime the quilt had accumulated over the past 11 months while I was working on it.  It actually took me longer to make Lars's quilt than it took me to make LARS.



Avatar photo from Sci-Fi Heaven

By the way, the reason I look so flushed in that binding picture is that my husband has been playing around with the settings on his fancy camera and decided that "extra vivid" colors would make for better pictures than a "normal" color setting.  My quilt fabrics are certainly bright and colorful, but they aren't as garish as they look in this picture.  My hair isn't really this dark, my skin isn't really red, but in some of the other pictures he took I look BLUE like the creepy Avatar people.  Trust me; this is not a good look for me.

So, a few quick notes about the binding, not because I'm an expert, but so I can remember for next time:  This is the first time I used bias-cut binding.  Lots of sources recommend bias binding for quilts with scalloped or zigzag edges, or for those with rounded corners, but Diane Gaudynski swears that bias binding lays smoother without rippling and she recommends it for every quilt.  I also found a couple of other sources advocating that bias binding would wear better over time.  Since I knew this quilt was going to be in and out of the washing machine many times over the years, I decide to give the bias binding a try.  Once I had cut my bias strips on a 45 degree angle and sewn them into one long, continuous strip of binding, the process of attaching it to the quilt was no more difficult than it would have been to use lengthwise or cross-grain strips of binding fabric. 

Machine Stitching the Binding with 1/4" Patchwork Foot #37

In the past, with my 100% cotton battings, I've always cut my binding strips 1 7/8" wide, machine stitched them to the front of my quilts with my 1/4" patchwork foot, and the double layer of binding would wrap snugly around the edge of the quilt, completely covering the machine stitching line on the back of the quilt when I sewed it down by hand.  Diane's Guide to Machine Quilting book suggests a 2" cut width for 1/4" finished width binding, so I went with that this time.  The trouble is, my seam allowance with my Patchwork Footsie #37 is more of a scant 1/4", so I had to go back and resew it a little wider in order to end up with a binding that was approximately the same width on the front and back sides of the quilt.  Especially with this Hobbs Tuscany Silk batting, which got pretty flat where it was densely quilted near the edges, I would have been better off with a 1 7/8" cut width on my strips like I usually do.  Hopefully I'll remember that next time!

So now here it is, on Lars's bed:

Despite the appearance of Lars's bookshelves, we have not recently been robbed.  Lars insists that this is a highly specialized organizational system and that he alone knows EXACTLY where each and every book, LEGO, trading card, and candy wrapper is located.   Yeah, I'm not buying it either.  But at least now we will always be able to find his bed!  By the way, if Lars had won the decorating battle, all four of his walls would be the same bright orange as the brightest fabric in his quilt.  I compromised with hyper-bright orange wallpaper in his en suite bathroom, and a more restful shade of blue for his bedroom walls.  The Day-Glo quilt is primarily light blue and orange to tie those two areas together.  The last project on my list for Lars's bedroom is a window treatment, because the window looks too bare to me with just shutters.  I'll probably eventually do some kind of rectangular cornice above the window rather than drapery panels, but nothing too wild.  We already have quite a bit going on in this bedroom visually!



Working Out the Kinks on FMQ Paisley Flames

FMQ Leaves/Flames/Paisleys Getting Smoother

Out of 35 drunkard's path blocks in this quilt, I have just over half quilted with what was originally supposed to be flames, but looked more like leaves, and are evolving into paisleys.  You'll remember that the motif in the center of each circle was stitched flawlessly and automatically by computer, thanks to a digitized design and the embroidery module of my Bernina 200/730E machine.  My first impulsively-stitched FMQ thingys radiating out from the computer-stitched designs were crooked, jerky, and wretched.  I hoped that, if I just kept at it, they'd get better and better and the ugly first attempts would disappear into the finished quilt, but they didn't seem to be getting much better after the first few days. 

At first, I was stitching these "flames" from the outside in, quilting the outline shape first and then trying to fit the concentric arcs of stitching inside that outline.  I did a little research on Leah Day's fabulous free-motion quilting web site, and realized that the flames I was trying to quilt were basically the building blocks of her paisley fill design -- and she says to start with a small teardrop, and then build out from the center.  I decided to try it that way today and -- to my amazement and delight -- I instantly was able to achieve much better results.  See how the lines are smoother and the stitch length is more consistent?


Today's FMQ Efforts


Unfortunately, it took a long time for me to work the kinks out with this design.  Whatever -- I just keep telling myself that I'm doing the best I can today.  If I waited to do FMQ on a real quilt until I was perfect, I'd never get enough practice in to get there.  I do think I'm going to have to add something else between my flames/leaves/paisleys, but it's going to be something EASIER that I have practiced successfully!  I just want this quilt to be done already and on Lars's bed...

In other news, my little boys are coming home the day after tomorrow after three weeks of traipsing around Florida swamps, zoos and beaches with their paternal grandparents.  Yippee!  Note to self: Three weeks is TOO LONG!  It's too quiet in my house when they aren't here, and even though I did the weekly laundry in half the usual time, it was depressing not to have little undershirts and frog pajamas to fold.  I miss their noisiness in the morning, their hugs, and our nightly bedtime story routine.  Even my dogs are concerned -- they go into the boys' bedrooms, turn around and give us this significant LOOK that says, "HELLO, Pack Leaders!  Haven't you forgotten something important somewhere?!  Where's the rest of our pack???" 

Drunken Dragons Quilt FMQ: The Final Stretch

Blazing Sun or Rose of Sharon?

Okay, so this is what I'm doing to fill in some of the dead space around the digitized quilting motif I stitched in the center of each circle of my drunkard's path quilt.  I probably should have practiced this first before starting in on the actual quilt,  because for one thing, I'm not executing this design very smoothly.  Furthermore, now that I step back and take a look at it, what I intended to be quilted flames shooting out from my blazing suns now looks an awful lot like LEAVES around a ROSE OF SHARON flower.  Shhh...  Don't tell Lars I'm quilting flowers into his Drunken Dragons quilt!  At this point, I just want to be finished already and on to something else.  I'm hoping that my flames/leaves will get better as I work my way throught the 35 quilt blocks, so I'm skipping around all over the quilt top as I do the free motion "flames."  The idea is that the wobbly early attempts will be less noticeable if they aren't all consecutive.  I suppose I could add more flames and/or echo quilting between the flames.  I'm going to quilt a few more this way tomorrow, then step back and make a decision.  Nothing good happens in my sewing room after 10 PM anyway!

Quilting Inspiration From End of Grade Exam Proctoring



Quilting Inspiration?


In an effort to be a "more involved" parent, I spent three mind-numbingly boring hours proctoring End of Grade (EOG) Math Testing at my kids' school today.  For some mysterious reason, I was assigned to carry out my duties as test warden in the After Care room rather than in a regular classroom, and there were a total of two seventh-grade students testing in there today.  The After Care room is a dreary, desolate place that is devoid of the posters and students' work which typically festoons the walls of actual classrooms.  Our testing dungeon was enclosed by three grayish-white walls, one garishly cobalt blue wall, and its windows were completely covered with dreary white metal miniblinds (to minimize distractions, no doubt).  There was a white dry erase board, blank except for where the test administrator had scrawled the start time and the time of the next scheduled break, and a few television sets enthroned on their A/V carts were parked in the room as well, but televisions are even less exciting than usual when they aren't turned on.  In fact, the only interesting thing to gaze upon in the entire room was this box of Kleenex:

I stared at this Kleenex box for the better part of three hours today, while simultaneously assisting the teacher/test administrator to supervise two intellectually gifted seventh graders to ensure they were completely darkening the little bubbles on their answer sheets.  I was pretty confident in the students' ability to color in their answer bubbles on their own, and I wasn't about to hover over their shoulders throughout the exam, but the State of North Carolina tapped me to monitor this testing environment and ensure that there were no "irregularities," so that's what I had to do -- with one eye.  Because my other eye was staring at the Kleenex box the whole time.  Multitasking at its finest!! 

Design from Retired OESD Collection #788

Of course, the Kleenex box was only captivating me because I'm on the prowl for quilting design ideas now that I finished quilting in the ditch around all of those big circles.  I went through my stash of professionally digitized outline quilting designs for my embroidery module, and I ended up coming back to the same Keryn Emmerson design (from OESD retired Collection #788, Quilting Inspirations by Keryn Emmerson) that I was drawn to initially (at left):

I'll use my embroidery module to automatically stitch this motif in the center of each circle

The circles on my quilt are 11" diameter, but my sewing machine can only embroider a design with a maximum width of 5.75".  That leaves about a 3" wide ring around my design that I'll need to fill with some kind of free motion quilting.  At first I thought I'd just echo quilt around the design, but that would be almost as boring as proctoring the EOG exams, and if I've learned one thing from my recent free motion quilting adventures, it's that smooth, perfect circles are not reasonable goals for beginners!  Plus they wouldn't really add anything to the quilting design.

So now, back to the Kleenex box (I'll bet the students and the teacher administering the exam think I'm bonkers for staring at that Kleenex box all morning, and then taking a PICTURE of it with my phone before I left!).  Maybe I could free motion quilt some flames/petals/sunshine rays or whatever, similar to the design on the Kleenex box, around the embroidered motif to fill the rest of the space in my circles?  I'm going to stitch out several samples of this motif so I can experiment and practice before I start in on the real deal.

By the way, the jury is still out on the Bernina BSR Stitch Regulator.  I used the BSR for two of my quilt circles, but I found that the foot itself is pretty thick and bulky, and it obstructs my view when I have to stitch away from myself diagonally to the right, so I felt like I was sewing blind for a quarter of each circle.  For this task, I felt much more comfortable using Foot #24 and controlling stitch length manually.  I will try quilting with and without the BSR again when I do the free motion quilting around the circular designs.  Part of me would really like to master free motion quilting without this fancy gadget, because you never know if someday my sewing machine will die a terrible, horrible death at a time when I can't afford to replace it with the luxury, top-of-the-line model.  Pretty much ANY sewing machine can be used for free motion quilting, as long as you can lower the feed dogs and put on a darning foot.

Plodding Along, In Circles

Hello, friends and family!  I hope everyone had a wonderful Mother's Day yesterday. 

I think I'm about halfway done with the free motion ditch quilting around the circles on Lars's "Drunken Dragons" Drunkard's Path quilt.  Thanks to the invisible nylon monofilament thread, the stitching is practically invisible on the front of the quilt -- oopses and all -- but on the back of the quilt you can see the grid of straight stitching that I did along the straight seamlines and the outlines of the circles.  I'm not using that BSR thing to control the stitch length, but I feel like I'm doing alright without it for this task.  The hardest thing is controlling the bulk of the big, heavy quilt while I try to move it in a big, huge circle without any jerks or tugs.  I have lots of jagged spots on my circles if you look closely on the back, so we won't be posting any more close ups of the back from here on out.

One of the sales ladies at the Bernina dealership has agreed to give me a one-on-one lesson on Thursday to show me how to stop and start the expensive BSR Bernina Stitch Regulator contraption and how the different modes work, because the directions that came with the darned thing are atrocious.  People look at me like I'm crazy when I say I can't get the BSR to work for me, which means there must be something REALLY EASY that I'm missing.  My issues are:

1. I'm unclear about how to start and stop a line of quilting stitches in each of the two stitching modes of BSR.  I need the first 5-7 stitches and the last 5-7 stitches of every line of quilting to be really tiny so they don't pull out when I clip the thread tails.  How do I secure my stitches in Mode 1 if the sewing machine is going to make all of the stitches the same length? 
2. I'm trying to stitch 11" diameter circles, but I can only control an area of about 4-6" at a time.  That means I slowly sew for a few inches, then need to stop to reposition my hands.  When I pick up my hands to reposition them, the fabric always moves just a smidge, and the BSR laser contraption picks up on the fabric movement and starts sewing again before I'm ready.  How do I disengage the BSR long enough to move my hands?
3. I tried to use my needle stop down function to make sure nothing shifts when I use my hands, but that's a problem, too -- with BSR, the machine starts stitching when the fabric MOVES, but when I'm ready to start sewing again I can't move the fabric when the needle is sticking down into it.  Am I supposed to use needle stop down, and then manually raise the needle again when I'm ready to stitch?  Then I have to take one of my hands off the quilt to raise the needle, and then the fabric shifts again and my quilting line gets a crooked little snag.
4. Finally, on  my 18" practice sample, I was not getting even stitches with my BSR at all.  For one thing, most of the stitches were much shorter than the length I had set the machine to.  Then there would be random LOOOONNNNG stitches here and there.  Maybe I was moving the fabric too fast at that point?

Anyway, I'm keeping an open mind about the BSR until I have the dealer walk me through it on Thursday.  Then on Friday I'm taking a beginner machine quilting class at a store about an hour away from me while the kids are in school, and that class won't have anything to do with the BSR because it's a Brother dealership, not Bernina hosting the class.  One way or another, I'm going to learn how to do this.  Saturday morning I have another embroidery software mastery class.  The irony is that, with all these sewing classes, there isn't much time left over for actual sewing!

Have a wonderful week.

Free Motion Circle Quilting FINALLY In Progress!

Free Motion Ditch Circle, Backing Side

Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt has been languishing in my studio untouched for the past three weeks, ever since my disastrous initial attempt to quilt "in the ditch" along the 11" diameter circular seamlines.  I experimented briefly with both Mode 1 and Mode 2 of the Bernina Stitch Regulator (BSR) attachment, which is supposed to make free motion quilting easier by automatically regulating stitch length.  For me, at least with the task of trying to place stitches precisely along the seamline, the BSR felt like a crazy robot driving the sewing machine out of control.  Every time I stopped to reposition my hands on the quilt, the machine started sewing again before I was ready.  Maybe I need more practice with the BSR, and the instructions that came with it are horrible -- maybe I wasn't using it correctly.  For instance, the instructions say "disengage the BSR function" but NOWHERE in the instructions does it say HOW to disengage the BSR function.  Tap the foot control?  Press a button somewhere?  Your guess is as good as mine!

Bernina Freehand Quilting Foot #29

Anyway, yesterday I removed the BSR foot and replaced it with Freehand Quilting Foot #29 to try some old school free motion quilting.  Feed dogs down, upper tension reduced for the monofilament nylon thread, and we're flying without a safety net!  There are a number of different feet you can use for free motion quilting.  What they all have in common is that spring in the shank.  Foot #29 is the one Bernina recommends for freehand quilting without the BSR function, and the clear plastic sole of the foot is supposed to give you great visibility so you can see where you're stitching.  Sounds great in theory, but when I was using this foot yesterday I found that the sewing machine light on the shiny clear plastic created a terrible glare that made it impossible to see my seamline accurately through the clear plastic foot.  I pulled out my Feetures books and discovered that there's another foot, Freehand Embroidery Foot #24, that would probably work better for this task.  Amazingly, I do not already own this presser foot.  My Bernina dealer is out of stock but expects it to come in with their next shipment in a few days, so meanwhile, I'm stuck with my clear foot.

Free Motion Quilting "In the Ditch" with Foot #29

Bernina Freehand Embroidery Foot #24

See what I mean about the glare?  The foot I'm waiting on has an open toe front, which should make it a lot easier to see the seamline I'm trying to follow.  I don't have any idea why they call it an embroidery foot -- I would think the ends of the open toe would get caught in long satin stitches if you were using it for embroidery.

Oh, and notice the gloves in the photo above?  I have a couple pairs of quilting gloves with rubber fingers, which are supposed to make it easier to grip the fabric of the quilt.  I hate wearing gloves, but I'm trying to be open-minded so I'm wearing them for now. 

Close Up of my Non-BSR Free Motion Stitching, Backing Side

The stitching itself is far from perfect as you can see in this picture from the backing side.  I am really happy with the busy print I chose for the backing, because from a distance the wobbly lines aren't noticeable at all. 

Close Up Non-BSR Free Motion Ditch Quilting, Top Side with Invisible Thread

From the front of the quilt, the mistakes and unevenness are even harder to see, thanks to the monofilament nylon invisible thread.  When the quilt is washed for the first time, it should shrink and pucker a little even though the fabrics are prewashed and the batting is a silk blend, and that will camouflage the ooopses even more.  It's not perfect, but it's good enough.  I have a feeling that each circle will come out a little smoother than the last one as I work my way through the quilt.

I don't forsee any quilting time today, though.  I have to get in the shower now so I can vote against Amendment One, even though the latest polls indicate that it's likely to pass.  Honestly, I don't see what the fuss is about.  Why do so many straight people feel threatened by gay marriages? 

After voting, I'll head straight to my piano lesson, and from there I pick up the kids from school.  We'll be rushing through homework and dinner tonight so we can make it to Night of the Arts, where Lars and Anders will be playing trombone and recorder with their classmates in their school's annual arts extravaganza.  Less than 5 weeks of school remain before summer vacation! 

Welcome to Rebecca's Ugly Quilting Blog!

"Regulated" Stitches?

You know all those other quilting blogs, where beautiful projects with exquisite workmanship are showcased on a regular basis?  This is not one of those -- not today, anyway, and probably not tomorrow, either.  Just take a gander at the lovely free motion quilting in the photo above.  Since I used invisible nylon monofilament thread in the needle, we're looking at the back side of the quilt in this photo.  The straight lines were stitched with a walking foot, stitch length set to 2.5, and then I attempted to stitch in the ditch around the curved seam of a drunkard's path block using the BSR Bernina Stitch Regulator contraption for my Artista 200/730 machine.  This magical machine footsie is supposed to count the fabric threads with a "laser" as I'm moving the quilt with the feed dogs down, automatically adjusting the needle speed so that I get nice, even stitches despite my relative inexperience. 

Dr. Evil explains the "Laser" Technology of the Bernina Stitch Regulator

Hmmm...  Do you think Bernina would like to use MY quilting sample to advertise their technology?

Bernina Stitch Regulator, courtesy Bernina USA

There are two different "modes" for the BSR foot, and since I got wretched results with Mode 1, I'm going to see if Mode 2 works better for me.  I got herky-jerky hiccups each time I tried to reposition my hands on the quilt because the machine kept stitching when the fabric moved slightly.  What most annoys me, though, is that the stitch length does not look ONE BIT "regulated" to me.  They are all way smaller than the 2.0 length the machine was set for, and each stitch is its own unique length, many of them tiny little locking-stitch length that will provide me with HOURS of fun as I attempt to unpick them with a seam ripper.

Well, when all else fails, there's always education, right?  I've signed up for a machine quilting class at a quilt shop in Concord next month.  Drastic times call for drastic measures!  All of my quilting books and blogs to read are all well and good, but there's nothing like having someone who knows how to do it looking over your shoulder to tell you exactly what you're doing wrong.

Not that I'm going to just put this quilt aside for the next few weeks!  I'm going to try wearing those kooky rubberized quilting gloves.  I'm going to try BSR Mode 2, and I'm going to try flinging the BSR contraption across the room and doing it the old fashioned way, with a plain old darning foot and no training wheels.  I may even try to use the walking foot and turn the quilt around under the needle, although I doubt that will work.

In case you're interested, here's what I accomplished so far, the straight lines quilted with the walking foot:

Straight Seamlines Quilted, Except for Circles

I quilted the seam line and two additional quilting lines to either side of the seam lines, both vertically and horizontally, except for the seam lines transecting my circles.  Next I want to quilt just the circular seams, before going on to do something pretty in the center of each circle. 

And now, a special treat to reward those who have stuck with me throughout this whole whining post:

Little Bald Lars with his Roman Square Quilt

That, friends, is the first quilt I ever made, a Roman Square for Little One Lars's "big boy bed" back in 2002.  It has school buses, doggies, sailboats, and all sorts of other I Spy fodder, and it is still on his bed today where it shall remain, until the new quilt is finished!

Happy Sunday!

Men and Boys in Easter Suits, with Ties!

Father and Sons in Easter Finery

Don't my menfolk clean up nicely for Easter Sunday?  Now that I see the pictures, I think the boys' jacket sleeves were too short.  Ah, well -- I got a full year out of those cute little suits, and Anders will be wearing Lars's next year!

Lars & Anders at Church

This one is my favorite.  What more could I ask for?

Well, the boys are back at school, and it's the first day of the last marking period.  We're in the home stretch of the school year, with summer beckoning from just around the corner.  Where did the year go?!

I managed to sneak in a little quilting time yesterday afternoon while Bernie was fiddling with his bushes in the back yard.  I finished the "straight" lines with the walking foot.  The quotation marks are because it came out looking like graph paper drawn freehand, without a ruler.  You get the idea that the lines are INTENDED to be straight and evenly spaced, but you wonder if the quilting wasn't done during a mild earthquake.  Also, despite the anguish and care that went into starching and basting this quilt, the dreaded evil pleats have been cropping up all over the back of the quilt, like this:

"Straight" Quilting with Stitched-Down Pleat

It's not as if that's the only place it happened, either.  There are so many places where I've got stitched-in pleats, it's almost like it's an intentional design feature.  You know, the way the ubiquitous clumps of dog fur dust bunnies all over my house are an intentional design feature, not an indication of slovenly housekeeping.  Ahem!

Where did I go wrong?  I honestly don't know.  Maybe I didn't starch the backing enough.  Yet the stiffness and stability provided by the starch seemed to wear off gradually as I handled the quilt, rolling and unrolling, folding and unfolding it while I was quilting.  Now it doesn't even feel starched anymore, but there's plenty of quilting left to be done.  Should I have used MORE safety pins for basting?  Was I tugging and pulling too much as I was quilting?  This thing is monstrously huge and heavy, and the table that I set up to the left of me does absolutely no good whatsoever.  I'm really struggling with the bulk of this quilt.

Well, the good news is that I NO LONGER HAVE TO WORRY THAT I'LL RUIN A PERFECT QUILT WITH POORLY EXECUTED FREE MOTION QUILTING!  It's definitely NOT perfect anymore, by any stretch...  ;-)

I packed away the walking foot, cleaned out the lint and oiled my machine, put in a fresh #60 sharp needle, and wound up several bobbins.  Next time I go in my sewing room, I'll be doing some free motion practice with the BSR foot in preparation for quilting those circles "in the ditch" of the circular seams.  Since it's not exactly a cake walk to stitch in the ditch along a straight seam line, with the help of the feed dogs, I'm VERY NERVOUS about how this is going to go, but I just can't see any way out of it.  That line needs to be quilted and there's no other way to do it.  I just have to know that it won't be perfect, and be grateful that I chose the invisible thread so my mistakes won't jump out at me from across the room!

Wish me luck!

The Beast Has Been Basted! Onwards to the Quilting!

A Sea of Safety Pins

There are about 730 size #1 safety pins more or less evenly spaced throughout my 70" x 105" Drunken Dragons quilt now.  I tried to be careful to keep the layers perfectly smooth, straight, and flat while I was pinning, ever fearful of ending up with those pleats and puckers on the backing side after machine quilting.  I even flipped Anders' Froggy Quilt of Many Colors over to try to get pictures of the pleats and puckers and knots that I'm trying to avoid this time, and you know what?  I couldn't even FIND them!  I know they're there, but evidently the "oopses" weren't as bad as they seemed at the time.  That's encouraging, right? 

Kwik Klip tool and Size #1 Curved Safety Pins

A quick word about pin basting: as far as I'm concerned, the Kwik Klip tool is absolutely mandatory for this task.  It costs about $7, and it's a wood handled tool that looks sort of like a blunt awl with grooves around the metal end.  It's used to lift the pointed end of the safety pin away from the fabric and close the pin without scratching and poking your fingers.  Even if you managed not to stab yourself closing pins without the tool, you would still have extremely sore fingertips after so many hundreds of pins.  This tool is worth its weight in gold, and you can get one here if you can't find one at your local quilt shop.  I use curved, nickel-plated, rust-proof size #1 safety pins to baste my quilts, and I try to evenly space them about 3" apart throughout the quilt.  I was careful not to put pins too close to the seam lines between blocks, because I'll be quilting "in the ditch" right along those seams lines with my walking foot to stabilize the quilt before I do any other quilting.

I'm also planning to attempt quilting in the ditch along the curved circle seam on each block, but that's going to have to be done free motion, with the feed dogs down, so I don't have to wrestle with turning the quilt 360 degrees for every circle. 

Variegated Machine Quilting Threads I will NOT be Using, YLI & King Tut

Which brings me to the Thread Question.  This is going to be my first quilt using nylon monofilament "invisible" thread in the needle.  I briefly considered some of these lovely variegated machine quilting threads that I had in my stash, but then I noticed that they were all 40 weight threads and I remembered all the reasons I had opted to go with invisible thread this time:  Heavy decorative threads might look great with my fabrics, but they will draw attention to every quilting hiccup or oops, and I'm very much a beginner at free motion quilting, so there are bound to be plenty of them.  Also, as I discovered on past projects, the fancy quilting designs that are digitized to stitch automatically with my machine's embroidery module tend to look bulky where the design backtracks to get from one place to another, and you can get little bumpy knots on the back of the quilt at points or places where the design stitches over itself too much.  I usually prefer natural fibers, and had an initial aversion to invisible "plastic" thread -- but Harriet Hargrove and Diane Gaudynski, arguably the most accomplished machine quilting experts around, both have used the invisible nylon monofilament thread in their award-winning quilts, and they recommend it for beginners.  If it's good enough for Harriet and Diane, it's good enough for me!


In my research on this thread, I found that most quilters use invisible nylon thread in the needle only, and recommend a 60 weight cotton embroidery thread in the bobbin.  I have heard wonderful things about Aurifil Mako 50 weight cotton thread for both piecing and quilting, which is supposed to be combine the benefits of 50 and 60 weight threads, but none of the shops local to me carry Aurifil and I wasn't about to order it online since I want a color that will virtually disappear on the Scrabble label fabric (I appliqued the label to the quilt backing prior to layering and basting so it will be quilted in and never come off, but I don't want to see contrasting quilting thread running all over the scrabble tiles).

Boring Threads I WILL Be Using: SewArt, YLI, Bottom Line & Mettler

I went to my local Bernina dealership, and I bought both a 60 weight Mettler cotton embroidery thread and a 60 weight polyester thread, The Bottom Line, that Superior Threads developed for machine quilter Libby Lehman.  I really just wanted the 60 weight cotton, because that's exactly what Diane Gaudynski's book says to use in the bobbin with invisible thread in the needle, but the two salesladies at the dealership are also quilters and they were pushy and insistent about the polyester thread.  They were trying to be helpful, but they made me feel like I was disrespecting my quilting elders if I didn't opt to do it their way, and the same ladies gave me attitude when I came in to buy more #1 safety pins after I ran out of them earlier this week.  You know, the raised eyebrows and the barely audible sniff of disapproval as they checked me out.  Apparently THEY use the larger #2 pins and they work just fine for them.  Maybe they use a thicker, loftier polyester batting instead of the thin batts I use, who knows?  The thing is, there is no one "right" way to do any of this.  Some quilters prewash fabric, some use it straight off the bolt.  Some starch, some don't.  There are raging debates about every marking product out there, and each quilter needs to try different things to find out what works best for him or her (yes -- there ARE he-quilters out there, too!).  The way I navigate the minefield of conflicting options is to seek out those quilters whose work I most admire, and find out what products and techniques they are using.  I didn't mind buying both threads this time, because it's possible that my sewing machine will prefer one over another, and what doesn't get used on this quilt can go into my stash for a future project.  But I have had similar experiences in several other shops, where the mostly older salesladies who have been sewing for decades were not able to set aside their own values and preferences in favor of the customer's needs and the profitibility of their employer.  When I was shopping for fabric for my very first quilt, the quilt shop ladies tried to talk me out of buying the more expensive (and exciting!) batiks that I was drawn to -- they felt that I should be shopping in the clearance fabric section until I was more experienced, and told me so!  My point in mentioning all of this is that there is a huge opportunity for quilt shops and machine dealerships to improve their profitibility with some basic sales training for their staff.  If I had the option of another shop nearby, I wouldn't go back to this one at all.  Okay -- off my soap box!

Another note about sewing with the invisible thread: On the advice of my experts, I did lower my needle tension when I used this thread for my invisible machine applique.  I put a lightweight cotton embroidery thread in the bobbin, matched to my background fabric, lowered the top tension by one, and used the built-in invisible applique stitch on my machine, with some minor length and width adjustments.  I also put the invisible thread on the thread stand attachment that I bought for embroidery threads, instead of using the horizontal spool holder on the machine.  Using a free-standing cone thread stand would be another option, but this thread benefits from a little extra breathing room as it comes off the spool and travels to the tension disks to prevent it from kinking up and misbehaving.

My espresso machine is fixed and running smoothly again, thanks to my "handy" husband, so all is well again in my caffeinated world.  Today I've got some errands to run and phone calls to make, and Anders has his first Suzuki violin lesson this afternoon.  I'm hoping to sneak in 30 minutes of sewing time either today or sometime tomorrow.  I'll post more pictures once the quilting adventure has begun.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Technology Trickle-Down Takes Too Long! A Road Block for the Drunken Dragons Quilt

Keryn Emmerson design, enlarged to max hoop width, still too small for my quilt

So, here's my dilemma.  My Grand Plan for this Drunken Dragons quilt involved using the embroidery module on my Bernina Artista 200E/730E to do "in-the-hoop" decorative quilting in the center of each of the large circles, with background grid quilting to be done with my walking foot.  I was going to layer the quilt top with batting and backing, hoop a piece of stabilizer and adhere my quilt sandwich on top with temporary spray adhesive, run a basting line along the outside edge of the hoop to keep things from shifting, and then quilting a perfect decorative motif was going to be as easy as pushing one button on my sewing machine and watching the computer stitch out perfect repetitions of the selected quilting design onto each and every circle on this quilt.  The seam lines on my circles would make it especially easy to get the placement of the designs right, which is one of the biggest challenges of machine embroidery (for me, anyway). 

Keryn Emmerson design from OESD #788

I found the perfect quilting motif, too -- it's from the Oklahoma Embroidery Suppy & Design Collection 788, Quilting Inspirations by Keryn Emmerson, and it looks kind of like a blazing sun.  Perfect, right? 

My 11" Diameter Circles

Wrong!  When I sat down at the computer to enlarge this design, I selected the largest hoop that I have for my sewing machine, which is the Oval Hoop at 255 mm x 145 mm, or about 10" x 5.75".  Then I printed out a template of the enlarged design and went upstairs to "try it out" on my quilt top, as you see in the first photo of this post.  Boo, hiss!  It's WAY too small.  I guess I was thinking that the Drunkard's Path blocks I made were 7" x 7", and the circle was only a portion of that block...  It didn't dawn on me that since it took FOUR 7" blocks to make one circle, my circles were going to be larger than the maximum embroidery field of my sewing machine.  They are 11" diameter circles.

Bernina Artista 730E, photo courtesy Bernina USA

Now, it would be so much easier to just accept this and move on, and come up with a different plan, if my circles were too big to be quilted with the embroidery module on ANY sewing machine, but there's the rub: My Artista 200E computerized sewing and embroidery machine came out in 2002, and it was the top-of-the-line model at that time, but that was 10 years ago.  In 2006, when Bernina came out with the Artista 730E, I was able to pay to have my machine upgraded to the equivalent of the newest model, which is why I refer to my sewbaby as a 200E/730E.  The coolest new feature with the release of the 730 was the Bernina Stitch Regulator, or BSR Function, which facilitates even stitch length while free-motion quilting. 

Bernina 830LE, photo courtesy Bernina USA

But in 2008, Bernina came out with a beast of a new TOL sewing machine, the 830E (not to be confused with the 830 model they sold during the 1980s).  Right now they are promoting this Limited Edition version with pretty red graphics on the cover.  It's faster, it has a gigantic bobbin that holds a ton of thread, and of course the first thing you notice is that the whole machine is a lot bigger, with much more space to the right of the needle -- obviously, that's going to be really helpful to quilters who struggle to fit large quilts under the machine.  But the feature I'm most longing for at the moment is the much larger embroidery sewing field of the 730E's Jumbo Hoop, which measures a whopping 260 mm x 440 mm, or approximately 10 1/4" x 17 3/8".  If I had this machine, I could enlarge that design motif to fit my 11" quilt circles perfectly.  It's not like I can just get a wider hoop for my existing machine, either -- this is outside the limits of what my sewing machine is able to do.  Now, at an approximate retail price of $10,000, I'm not rushing out to the Bernina store to buy this machine just so I can finish Lars's quilt the way I want to do it.  That's not in the budget right now, and even if I found $10K under the sofa cushions or something (hah!) I don't think I could bring myself to spend that much on a sewing machine -- I don't even have enough time to spend sewing to justify that kind of splurge.

So instead, I'm consoling myself with the inevitability of Technology Trickle-Down.  Whatever blistering hot, bleeding edge technology is only available on the priciest models today will eventually be seen on midpriced models as well.  Over the next few years we'll even start to see this snazzy red 830LE sewbaby showing up used on eBay for a fraction of the price of a new one, so that by the time my current sewbaby is ready for retirement I should be able to step up to a sewbaby with a big, wide embroidery hoop for much less than it would cost me to make that jump today. 

Now that we've finished our pity party, what are my options for finishing this quilt using equipment that I already own?  Well, I could hand quilt the whole thing, with designs as elaborate as my heart desires, but I'm not going to do that.  For one thing, I'd like to finish this before my eleven-year-old son is ready to head off to college.  Another reason not to hand quilt it is that the variety of fabrics I used are not all suitable for hand quilting.  The batiks are a bit too stiff, and some of the other fabrics have a slightly more open weave and are not perfectly balanced thread count on the warp and weft.  As I learned from Dierdre McElroy in a hand quilting class I was fortunate to take with her a few years ago, that means it would be impossible to get consistent, even, hand quilting stitches throughout this particular quilt -- I would have evaluated each fabric for hand quilting before I used it if I was planning to finish the quilt that way.  So, no hand quilting.

I have a couple of options for machine quilting.  If I had been machine quilting for years, and was really good at it, I could just mark the design I like directly on my quilt top, drop the feed dogs, and quilt it free-hand.  I don't have the skill level to pull that off.  Another option would be to find a quarter circle design and use my Hoop-It-All Double Wide Quilter's Square to quilt each circle in four stages.  This is an expensive 3rd party hoop contraption that "tricks" my machine so that I can embroider larger designs without rehooping, with a 14 1/2" square hoop that is divided into four quadrants that slide into position and lock in place.  I'm ashamed to admit that I have never even taken this gizmo out of the box, and it must have been at least four years ago that I purchased it at a seminar.  See why I can't bring myself to fork over the ten grand for that uff da machine, no matter how wild and wonderful it may be?  I haven't had time to learn how to use half of the sewing toys that I already own!  The downsides to the Hoop-It-All solution are that I would need to spend some time figuring out how it works, for one thing, but more importantly, I would need to find a completely different design that could be stitched out in four quadrants.  My blazing sun motif has continuous lines of stitching going all the way around the circle, so that wouldn't work.

Another idea, the one I'm leaning toward at the moment, is to select a digitized embroidery quilting design that I could stitch in-the-hoop at the center of each circle, about 5 1/2" diameter with my machine's Oval Hoop, and then I would embellish and enlarge the design to fill the rest of the 11" diameter circles using free motion quilting aided by my BSR function.  I could add wavy zigzag "rays" around my blazing suns, for instance.  That way, I'm getting the speed advantage and good-looking results of the computerized quilting, but also having a chance to practice some FMQ.  After all, I'm never going to get good at it if I don't ever roll up my sleeves and just do it, right?  So, while the completed quilt top continues to languish in my studio, my next order of business is going to be threading up my sewbaby with invisible nylon monofilament thread, making up some practice quilt sandwiches, and stitching out some of these motifs to see what kind of Frankenstein hybrid quilt design I can come up with for these gigantic circles.  I'll post the results, be they good, bad, or ugly.  Wish me luck!

THE QUILT TOP IS DONE!

Lars's Drunken Dragons Quilt Top, Fully Assembled, 70" x 105"

Lulu the Puppy Princess Poses with the Quilt Top

All 150 Drunkard's Path blocks have finally been assembled for Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt top.  Ta da!  I am really not as excited about this as you might expect, though, because I am much more confident in my patchwork skills than I am in my quilting skills, so the rest is all going to be uphill, with lots of experimentation and frog stitches (rip-it, rip-it!) along the way.  I even bought a new seam ripper, nice and sharp and ready to go.  How's that for a positive attitude?

Lulu kept prancing into my view finder when I was trying to get a picture of the quilt top.  She doesn't understand why anyone would want to see a picture that doesn't have a puppy princess in it.  Indeed!

Meanwhile, I still don't know for sure how I'm going to quilt this quilt, so it's time to take a break for some Research & Development.  I'm leaning toward quilting a decorative motif in the center of each circle with the "quilt in the hoop" embroidery method, but I can't get a large enough design (width-wise) in any of my machine's hoops and I don't feel like messing around with the Hoop-It-All Quilter's Square contraption for this project.  So I'm thinking I'll enlarge the selected motif as big as I can fit in my hoop, and after I've stitched one out on each circle, I'll go back and do some echo quilting around them with free-motion quilting (FMQ) to fill the rest of the circles.  That's my compromise between wanting to learn and practice FMQ and not wanting to mess up this quilt that I'm going to have to look at every day on Lars's bed.  Then I think I'll do grid quilting in the background with a walking foot, because one of the things I like best about this quilt is the contrast between the curved lines and the squares, so curvy quilting lines inside the circles, straight lines between them, should play that up nicely.  I'm still kicking around the idea of machine trapunto for added dimension on the circles, but I'm wondering if that's too large of an area to do trapunto and if that will make the quilt too bulky to work with under my little sewbaby.  I'll try to take pictures and post the results of my quilting experiments as I figure it all out.

Can you spot my "oops?"

This little "oops" was annoying to discover in the very last row of the quilt.  I thought we were really careful when we did the block layout to be sure that we didn't place blocks with the exact same fabric next to one another, but this one slipped by somehow.  Whatever -- I'm leaving it.  Nobody's perfect, right? It's not that big of a deal, and this is the bottom of the quilt, where I'm going to tuck it underneath the edge of the mattress so that all of the bedding doesn't end up on the floor every morning. 

I don't know when I'll get back to this project.  I've got receipts strewn all over the place that I've been organizing on-and-off for the accountant so he can prepare our taxes, and I really need to finish that up this week and cross it off my list.  (I wish I could just shove it all into a grocery bag and dump it out on his desk).  We're also taking Otto back to the vet tomorrow morning because it looks to me like he managed to pop a couple stitches and his incision is opening up instead of healing.  It has been nine days since he had his neutering operation, and I really had hoped he'd be back to his normal, rambunctious routine by now. 

At least he's getting used to the Cone of Shame and no longer cries constantly while wearing it.  Now he's actually using it like a snowplow, crashing into things or people deliberately with the cone.  That's what all the dents and dings are from.  Hopefully the vet will be able to seal his incision back up with a couple drops of surgical glue rather than having to restitch.  Cross your fingers for my puppy rabbit!