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!



August FMQ Challenge: Wendy Sheppard's Jester Hats

I was so excited when I found out that quilter Wendy Sheppard of Ivory Spring was giving the August Free-Motion Quilting Challenge tutorial at SewCalGal.  I have admired Wendy's work for a long time.  She's a tireless, prolific, and truly inspirational person who supports and encourages the work of others.  Her Thread Talk posts contain the best quilting tips and tutorials I've seen, and I refer to them often.  To view the original August Challenge tutorial, learn more about Wendy Sheppard, and see some examples of her breathtaking quilting, click here.  Come back when you're finished.

So, you're back?  Good.  Wipe the drool off your keyboard and let's get down to business!  Wendy's tutorial covered an allover motif she calls Jester Hats.  I spent at least an hour trying to doodle repeating jester hats on my iPad before I began quilting. 

My Jester Hat doodles, drawn in FREE Paper app for iPad in the waiting room at the pediatrician's office



More Jester doodles in Drawing Pad app for iPad

I am still having trouble with these allover designs in general -- anything where I have to concentrate on stitching a shape, while simultaneously thinking about how I'm going to travel with that motif to completely fill a space without getting stuck in a corner, leaving an unquilted "island" that I can't get back to, or crossing over a previous line of quilting.  I am not thrilled with my results for this exercise, but I think it's a fun motif with a lot of potential.  Like anything else, it will get better and better with repetition.

I used a pretty fat quarter of batik fabric with ugly Bob the Builder backing fabric and a scrap of Hobbs Heirloom Tuscany Silk batting, a 75 Schmetz Quilting needle, and 40 weight YLI variegated machine quilting thread for this sample.  You can see the jester hat pattern better from the back...  and it looks much better from a distance.  Trust me!

My Jester Hats, Backing Side Up

I had trouble visualizing the jester hats, so then I tried thinking about them as the number 3, or as chubby little baby tushies, or mushrooms that turn into the horns of a ram.  With the contrasting thread color against the backing fabric, every awkward "oops" jumps out at you.  But if I was stitching this in a thread color that blended into the background fabric, I think you'd just get the effect of the pretty texture without the mistakes being so glaringly obvious.  Here's what the sample piece looks like from the front:

My Jester Hat Sample, Right Side Up

Not as bad, right?  Or so I tell myself.  Here's one of the Up Close and Ugly shots:

The View from 6"

See those weird mushroom/chef's hat thingys?  Or are they Smurf feet?  How did that happen?  When Wendy quilts jester's hats, there are definitely no Smurf feet!  Also my stitch length was all over the place, mostly because I was experimenting with speed and never quite found the right rhythm that would keep the curves smooth without being so fast that I lost control.  Next time I attempt this design, I'm going to switch back to the finer thread weight that I'm more comfortable with and try making the motifs much smaller.  I just thought this particular motif would be fun to stitch big and bold with the variegated thread.  And I'm sure it would be, if it was done well!

Meanwhile, I'm about halway finished with the free-motion paisley fill on Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt.  I'm a little nervous about how densley quilted the circles are compared to the rest of the quilt, and I hope that the whole thing will get softer and snuggly again after I wash it for the first time.  I do like the way the paisleys look, though, and I never would have believed that I could quilt this design at all if you'd asked me a month ago.  If I can learn to quilt paislies, then surely I will learn to quilt jester hats with more practice!

FMQ Paislies on Lars's Drunken Dragons Quilt (In-Progress)

I'm using Mettler 60 weight 2-ply cotton embroidery thread for Lars's quilt, and I still feel like the dense fill pattern is making it stiff.  I wonder if the silk thread that Wendy Sheppard often uses would be softer?  I think she mostly quilts with Aurifil Mako cotton thread or with YLI silk thread, neither of which my local Bernina shop stocks.  I may have to order a couple of spools online just to play with.
Okay, enough blogging -- back to quilting!

And the Quilt Goes On: FMQ PAISLIES on the Drunken Dragons Quilt!

Paisley FMQ Fill Added Between Flame Paislies

Well, it seems that all the paisley-doodling I've been doing on my iPad over the last few days has really paid off.  I only practiced stitching this paisley free-motion quilting fill pattern for a few minutes on a scrap of fabric and batting before I felt like I could start in on the real quilt -- but I've been doodlling the design on my iPad with a stylus every chance I got over the last few days.  Not only did this allow me to practice the quilting design at times when I wasn't near the sewing machine, but it also saved a lot of fabric and thread.  I'm so excited about how this looks that I had to post it right away!

Completed Half Block

Surprisingly, the small paisley fill pattern is easier for me than the large FMQ flames that I quilted earlier, radiating out from each quilted medallion design.  You don't have to move the quilt as much to stitch little shapes as you do for a long line of quilting, so I'm finding that my stitches are coming out much more evenly (more or less the same length) with less effort and the whole process just feels so RELAXING.  I think the paisley fill between large flames will help to camouflage the jerky, uneven quilting from the early part of my learning curve, and they also help to make my blazing suns look like blazing suns again instead of like big Roses of Sharon with leaves.  However, I'm going to need a lot more thread to do the remaining 35 blocks...

Now that I see how densely I ended up quilting this, I'm really glad that I choose a lightweight quilting thread instead of the pretty-but-heavy 40 weight machine quilting thread.  Already I'm feeling some stiffness that I hope will soften up when I wash the finished quilt, but if I'd used 40 wt thread I'd have a cardboard quilt by the time I was finished.  The only bummer is that the shades of Mettler 60 wt cotton embroidery thread that I chose only come on dinky little 200 meter spools, and I've already gone through at least 10 of them and I'm headed out to buy 6 more spools tomorrow.  This is not, I repeat NOT, an economical way to buy thread.  I really need to get my hands on some of that Aurifil Mako 50 weight cotton thread that everyone has been raving about -- it comes in pretty colors including variegated (love!) AND comes on nice, big spools!

I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  This quilt, begun in October 2011, WILL be finished in less than a year.  And then I'll start another one.  ;-)

Free-Motion Quilting on my iPad

Quilt Doodling in Notes Plus app for iPad

Several of the free-motion quilting experts in SewCalGal's 2012 FMQ Challenge have advised doodling new quilting designs with pen and paper to get comfortable with the designs and commit them to muscle memory.  I don't take a notebook with me everywhere I go, but I usually do have my iPad.  Lately, I've been using the Notes Plus app on my iPad, along with a stylus, to practice doodling fill designs that I'm considering adding to Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt. I can doodle at red lights, I can doodle in the drive-through line at Starbucks or at the bank, I can doodle at a restaurant while we're waiting for the food to come, or while watching/listening to the Olympics on television.

Notes Plus is a powerful note-taking app that allows you to create documents combining handwriting, sketches, vector shapes, photos, and even audio.  You can click here to watch a YouTube video that walks you through the features of Notes Plus.  At $7.99, it's pricey for an app, but I originally downloaded it to use as a tool for taking notes in meetings with my interior design clients -- snap a photo of that window, record measurements, ideas, etc, and even move things around on the page so you can go back and add another idea after you've run out of room.  Then the notes can be exported as images or PDF files.  No more misplacing important pages!  Anyway, I think Notes Plus is a great tool for business or student note-taking, but there are simpler, less expensive options if you just want an app for doodling quilting designs.

Might I suggest:

Screen Shot of the Drawing Pad app for iPad

At $1.99, the Drawing Pad app for iPad has a much friendlier price tag than Notes Plus.  It seems to be geared towards children, with an in-app store for purchasing coloring books, etc., but I like the colors and different brush strokes.  This app also allows you to import a photo as a background.  This is a very handy feature.  Say you're reading a free-motion quilting tutorial online, like Wendy Sheppard's August tutorial on SewCalGal's blog.  The tutorial post includes photo sketches of Wendy's Jester Hat quilting motif.  All you have to do is save that image to your iPad, import it into the Drawing Pad app, and you can practice tracing the design over and over and over again on your iPad until you've ingrained that design into your muscle memory to where you can recreate it freehand.  Once you can draw a fill pattern almost automatically, barely having to think about it, it will be much easier to sit down at the sewing machine and quilt that pattern.  You could also use the import photo feature to practice quilting on an image of your actual fabric.

Okay, app developers out there: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to develop a Free-Motion Quilting App "FMQ for iPad!"  It would be based on a simple drawing app like Drawing Pad, but it would have some fabric backgrounds and quilting designs included in the app, like Stippling and Feathers, for instance.  The biggest difference would be that, instead of drawing with virtual markers, ink pens, or chalk, the FMQ for iPad app would let you draw with lines of thread stitches, maybe even letting you use an eyedropper tool to pick up a thread color from your fabric image, and definitely giving you the option to draw with variegated thread stitches.  Hop to it!

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!

Plodding Along with FMQ

Quilting Along on the Drunken Dragons Quilt for Lars

When my boys left for Florida without me on July 15th, I consoled myself with the thought of how much quilting I was going to get done while they were off galavanting around with their grandparents for three weeks.  You know that expression, "Life is what happens while we're making other plans?"  I've been doing a lot less quilting than I'd planned and a lot more moping around the house, sniffing their pillows and missing their boisterous noisiness.  I had this grand ambition of completely finishing Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt and having it on his bed in his bedroom when he arrived home on August 3rd, but I'm not sure if I'm really on schedule for that anymore.  The good thing is that, now that I'm past the halfway point and they'll be home in 8 days, I'm not feeling so gloomy anymore and that gives me the positive energy to get back in the sewing room and put my goofy rubber quilting gloves on again!

I did get a call from one of my favorite design clients on my secret bat phone a few days ago, so I'm coming out of my self-imposed hibernation to help her with some pillows and bar stools.  I got such a warm welcome when I stopped by the design showroom yesterday that I felt like the Prodigal Son.  Kill the fatted calf!  Rebecca needs pillow trim again! 

I promised myself that this would be a brief post so I could get back to quilting.  Speaking of which -- it's coming along pretty well, and I really do see it getting better and easier.  I'm looking forward to some smaller quilting projects after this is finished, so I can experiment with some different FMQ designs. 

8 Days until my little cuties come home!

The Cheater's Ultimate Guide to Quilting With Your Embroidery Module

Decorative Quilting the Easy Way: Quilting "In the Hoop" with an Embroidery Module

They say that it takes, on average, 80 hours of practice to learn free motion machine quilting.  That's what "they" say.  I say that it's like learning to draw all over again -- with your feet.  Still, it's a skill worth learning, because free motion quilting allows home sewers to quilt just about any design with almost any domestic sewing machine, in a fraction of the time that hand quilting would require.  The method I'm going to describe today is totally cheating -- like reading the Cliff Notes instead of reading the book -- but for me, it's a good way to get complex decorative quilting designs on my quilts NOW while I'm still working through the FMQ learning curve.  I have about 79 more hours of practice to go...  ;-)

Disclaimer:  I do not claim to be an expert on quilting, embroidery, or Bernina machines.  I'm going to share what has worked the best for me, but as they say, "your mileage may vary."  If you know of any tips or tricks that I haven't mentioned, or if you have a better method, please share in the comments!  I'm always willing to learn more. 

Speaking of learning more (from quilters who actually know what they're talking about!): Check out Wendy Sheppard's "Pretty Pillow, Quilted Heirloom" article in Bernina's Through the Needle magazine, Issue 28 from November 2008; I highly recommend it.  Wendy's pillow project is small and manageable, and it combines decorative embroidery module-stitched designs with begginer-friendly free motion quilting for stunning results.  Another resource I consulted was Jennifer Gigas' and Marlis Bennett's "Quilting In the Hoop" article for Bernina, and you can get a full PDF of that article right here.  Again, I consulted that article, but I did not follow their recommended method (they say to hoop just the quilt top with the batting, before adding the backing fabric, so the decorative quilting motifs are not stitched through all three layers of the quilt sandwich) because it wouldn't have given me the finished look that I wanted for my quilts, and because quilting with exposed batting underneath would create a lint nightmare for my sewing machine.

Artista 730E with Embroidery Module Attached, photo from Bernina USA

In order to quilt "in the hoop," you need to have a computerized sewing machine with an embroidery module.  Mine is a Bernina Artista 200E, upgraded to the equivalent of the current model Artista 730E.  However, any embroidery machine can do this technique.  With the embroidery module attached and a digital design file loaded into your sewing machine, exquisite and flawless decorative quilting designs are as easy as snapping a hoop onto your quilt, threading the machine, and pushing the start button.  The embroidery module, guided by the sewing machine's internal computer, moves the quilt around beneath the needle to ensure perfect placement of every stitch, every time.  It's so easy that I almost feel guilty!

Actually, it's easy NOW because I have finally worked the kinks out of my method. 

• First of all, ideally, you should plan your quilting at the very beginning, before you cut the first piece of fabric for your quilt top.  Why?  Because you will not be able to stitch out an embroidery-assisted quilting design that is larger than the maximum stitchable area of your machine's largest hoop.  Most quilt blocks are squares, which means that the maximum WIDTH of your largest hoop is going to determine how big your quilt blocks should be.  For my machine, the biggest round or square design I can stitch in one hooping is about 5 1/2" x 5 1/2".  So, next time I'm planning to quilt by embroidery module, I'll keep my block sizes 6" or smaller so I won't have to fill in and improvise to fill the rest of the space.

Planning Pays Off: This design fits the block properly in "Anders' Froggy Quilt of Many Colors," 2006

•  This method only works for small to medium quilts -- do not attempt this on a King or Queen bed quilt!  My Drunken Dragons quilt is 70" x 105," and thankfully, the quilting design I chose was non-directional so that I never had more than 35" of quilt crammed to the right of my needle under the sewing machine at once.  I feel like that was the outer limit.  Why?  Because the embroidery hoop moves when the design is stitching out, and when the left-most portion of the design is stitching, the right side of the hoop is almost touching the inside part of the sewing machine, leaving nowhere for all that 35" of quilt to go.  I had it sort of rolled up and bunched above the hoop during stitchout of the motifs in the center of my quilt, and had to be very careful to keep the excess out of the way of the needle and the moving hoop.  Quilting "in the hoop" will work well for throw or crib sized quilts, table runners, and other small or narrow items.
• Choose your quilting design carefully.  Sources for professionally digitized quilting designs include your machine dealer, where you can purchase design collections such as OESD Crafter's Collection #007, Quilting Whimsy by Diane Gaudynski, as well as online sources such as Amazing Designs or Oklahoma Embroidery Supply & Design (although OESD doesn't have a category for quilting designs, so you'll have to scroll through lots of not-what-I-wanteds before you find what you're looking for).  Anita Goodesign has some beautiful quilting designs as well.  If you own embroidery design software, you can easily digitize any design your heart desires -- it's just an outline stitch, after all.  Personally, I've had the best results with continuous designs that don't have any backtracking (sewing over a previously-stitched line to get to the next place in the design).  In the picture below from my 2003 "Celestial Double Nine Patch" quilt, the first time I quilted "in the hoop," you can see how the backtracking didn't always land exactly on the previously stitched line.  Could I have corrected this with better hooping and/or stabilizing?  Perhaps -- but for less headaches, just choose a different design!

Even if the second line of stitching had landed right on top of the other stitches where they belonged, the variegated thread I was using would have drawn attention to the backtracking because it always ends up being two different colors of thread.  This quilt is also a great example of What Not To Do because my quilt blocks were much bigger than my maximum embroidery hoop could stitch the designs, and I ended up with too much empty space around the designs. 

The nine patch blocks and borders of this quilt were grid quilted (crookedly) with a walking foot, and I was terrified of free motion quilting so I added some lame looking straight lines radiating from the corners and center points of the design, to meet the batting manufacturer's guidelines for how far apart the quilting lines should be spaced.  Yuck!  One of these days I'm going to go back and add more quilting to make that look better.  It will count towards those 80 hours of practice, and I couldn't possibly make it look any worse!

My "Celestial Double Nine Patch" quilt for Anders, completed in November 2003

[UPDATED March 4th, 2014: After writing this post and looking at that quilt again, I DID finally go back and fill in the blank space around the embroidered motifs with some free motion squiggle quilting.  It's wobbly and imperfect, but it looks a lot better than it did before.]

Celestial Double Nine Patch with FMQ Filler Around Embroidered Design added in 2012

• A Word About Tension: As soon as you snap that embroidery module onto your sewing machine, your machine tension is automatically altered to deliberately pull the loose needle thread underneath to the tighter bobbin thread.  If you were doing a regular embroidery design with satin stitches, this is exactly what you would want to ensure that none of your ugly black or white bobbin thread showed on the top of your embroidery, especially along the edges of narrow satin stitched columns.  This is why Gigas and Bennett recommend adding the backing afterwards, to hide the ugly unbalanced tension on the back of the quilt, which can look like this:

Unbalanced Tension, Backing Side

Who wants to see that ugliness on the back of a quilt they've worked hard to create?  Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simple.  Just manually change the needle tension back to normal before you stitch your design.  On my machine, with the threads I've been using on the Drunken Dragons quilt, I get perfectly balanced stitches with tension set at 4.0, but the tension drops down to 2.0 when I engage the embroidery function.  I just have to remember to change the tension back to 4.0 in the Edit screen before I stitch the design, and then the back side of my quilt comes out just as pretty as the front.  I put a Post-It note on the front of my sewing machine to remind myself to check the tension every time.  If you don't know how to adjust the tension for your machine, check your owner's manual or pester your sewing machine dealer until they show you how.  That's what they're there for!

• Speaking of thread, the first couple of times I quilted "in the hoop," I used heavy 40-weight YLI variegated machine quilting thread in the needle as well as in the bobbin.  For the Drunken Dragons quilt, I experimented with a much thinner 60-weight Mettler 2-ply cotton embroidery thread in the needle and bobbin, and found that the quality of stitching on both sides of my quilt look much better with the finer thread.  I can use a #60 Sharp or #75 Quilting needle with this fine thread, which makes for a very tiny hole in the quilt.  Moreover, there are some pretty short stitch lengths in the tight curves of these intricate designs, and the heavier thread just looks too thick and clumsy for my taste.  The bulk of any backtracking and tie-offs in your designs will be much less obvious on the back of the quilt when you're using a finer thread, too.  Quilting thread is a subject of murderous contention, though, and every quilter will savagely defend her favorite brand to the death, so I suggest you try different threads in secret, see what works best for you, and then quietly use your favorite one no matter what other people tell you!
• In my meager experience, using embroidery stabilizer was not necessary as long as I hooped the quilt (rather than hooping tearaway stabilizer, basting the quilt to the stabilizer, and then tearing the stabilizer off afterwards).  I used stabilizer for that first quilt, and it didn't stop the design from shifting slightly -- but it used up a LOT of stabilizer, and that stuff isn't cheap!  It also took longer to fuss with the extra steps of basting and removing the stabilizer, and as I'm thinking about it now, it's also possible that when I pulled the stabilizer off the back of the quilt, it exaggerated the tension problems by pulling the threads even more out of whack.  Now I'm just hooping the quilt "naked," (naked quilt, not naked me!) and I'm getting much better results.
• Hooping gets easier, I promise!  The hardest part of quilting "in the hoop" is getting the quilt hooped nice and straight, with everything lined up properly so the design will stitch out exactly where you want it to on your quilt.  My sewing machine can stitch out one of these quilting motifs in under 2 minutes, but at first it was taking me 15 minutes to get the hoop in place prior to each stitch out.  The good news is that I got faster and more accurate with my hooping as I worked my way through the quilt, until I was finally able to get the hoop in place almost as quickly as my machine was stitching the designs.  Use the plastic gridded template that came with your hoop and line it up with seamlines in your quilt top, if possible.  Draw horizontal and vertical center lines on your block prior to hooping (with chalk pencil or something else you know you can remove easily) if you have to.  Once you have the hoop attached to your machine, check the center point of the design (my machine has a button that will move the needle to the center point of the design).  Use the on-screen editing features of your machine to shift your design slightly if needed so that it is perfectly centered on every block.  Note that, if your hoop has hit anything that impeded its movement while stitching, it could have been knocked out of alignment like mine was when I started embroidering quilting motifs on my "Drunken Dragons" quilt.  I was able to go into my Embroidery Settings screen and recalibrate that on my own after a quick, panicked phone call to my Bernina dealer.  If you are sure you have centered your block perfectly but your design is still stitching off-center, look in your owner's manual and try recalibrating your hoop.

Hoop in Position, Quilt Block Perfectly Centered Using Seamlines and Gridded Template

So, what's next for Lars's "Drunken Dragons" quilt, now that all of the "in the hoop" designs have been stitched out?  Since I did not follow my own advice to plan the quilting designs at the beginning, I ended up yet again with skimpy little designs that do not adequately fill my blocks. 

See all that "dead" space around the fancy quilting design in the center of the circle?

That's okay, because I'm going to add some REAL free motion quilting around the designs I stitched with my embroidery module this time.  It won't be perfect, and I'm going to have to experiment to find something that looks good with the existing design AND isn't so difficult that I can't execute it successfully.  Wish me luck!

"In the Hoop" Quilting with the Embroidery Module

...And we're off to the races!  Here you can see I've secured my hooped quilt into the embroidery module of my Bernina Artista 200/730 sewing machine.  Notice the way I have the bulk of the quilt piled up around the sewing machine so the embroidery module can move freely without the weight of the quilt creating drag that would result in distortion or misalignment of the design.  I've also checked and double-checked that no part of the quilt is stuck UNDER the embroidery hoop, which would be truly disastrous!  

40 wt YLI Variegated Machine Quilting Thread

I'm glad I tested out a couple of different thread scenarios.  Although the design stitched out beautifully with the SewArt monofilament nylon thread in the needle and 60 weight Mettler cotton embroidery thread in the bobbin, I felt like my efforts would be wasted on all these fancy quilting designs if I couldn't see them on the top of the quilt.  I went back to those beautiful variegated YLI and Superior Threads machine quilting threads, but since those are much heavier 40 weight threads, I had to switch from a 75/11 quilting needle to a 90/14 needle that left a bigger hole, allowing the bobbin thread to show as little dots on the top of the sample quilt and the top thread to show up on the backing side.  The starting and stopping points in the outline quilting design were also quite pronounced, as you can see in the photo at left.  That's because the machine takes several tiny stitches at the beginning and end of each "ring" of the design to prevent the stitches from pulling out after the thread tails are snipped.  With this heavier thread, those stitches sort of pile up on top of one another, and they jump out at me even more because with the variegated thread it's usually two different thread colors coming together at the point where the two lines of stitching meet.  The knotty thread bumps were even worse on the back of the sample:

Backing Side, 40 wt in Needle, 60 wt in Bobbin

YUCK!!!!  Granted, I could have improved my results with the 40 weight thread by using the same weight thread in the bobbin and tweaking the tension, but that wouldn't make the knots go away.  With 60 weight thread, you can't see where the knots are and you can't even feel them when you run your hand across the back of the design.  Ultimately, I just thought the heavier 40 weight thread looked clumsy compared to the elegance and precision of the 60 weight thread with the tiny needle. 

Top Side, Sample Stitched with 75/11 Needle and 60 weight Cotton Thread

So for the next sample stitch out, I went back to my 75/11 quilting needle and threaded my needle with a light blue shade of Mettler 60 weight cotton embroidery thread, using the same thread in the off-white color for the bobbin.  I overrode the machine's embroidery tension setting and set it at 4.0 since I want balanced stitches and I'm using the same thread top and bottom (most of the time with embroidery, you want UNbalanced stitching with the decorative needle thread pulled slightly to the backing, since embroidery bobbin thread just comes in black or white). 

BACKING side, 75/11 Needle and 60 weight Cotton Embroidery Thread

This combination of needle, threads, and tension settings produced near perfect results on both sides of the quilt sample, as you can see on these red and yellow tractor fabric samples.  Isn't it amazing what a difference the thread makes?  Scroll back up and look at the ugliness I got with the 40 weight thread on that brown tractor fabric.  Same design, same everything, the only difference is heavier thread and the larger needle required to accommodate it. 

So, once I'd nailed down the needle/thread/tension particulars, I snapped a hoop onto one of the circles at the center of my quilt, trying to use the block seamlines to make sure the hoop was centered.  This is actually a lot more difficult than you'd think, especially due to the size and thickness of the quilt.  My first try wasn't centered as well as it could have been, but it's not noticeable from a distance so I decided not to rip it out, since that would leave needle holes in the batik fabric that might not close up completely when the quilt was washed.  I'll try to do a better job of lining it up on the next one. 

First Decorative Quilting Motif Stitched Out

Ta da!  The cotton quilting thread is just a bit more visible against my fabrics than the grid quilting that I stitched earlier with the invisible nylon monofilament thread. 

First Motif Stitched, Backing Side

As you can see from the back side, I still have a lot of space to fill in with free motion background quilting once I get all of these "in the hoop" quilting designs stitched out on the quilt.

It only takes two minutes for my sewing machine to automatically stitch out this design, and unless the quilt gets caught on something during stitching the design comes out perfectly every time.  Again, it would be nice if I could have enlarged my quilting design to 10" diameter to completely fill the big circles on my quilt, because then I wouldn't have to go back and add free motion quilting around every single motif.  (The Jumbo Hoop, available for the Bernina 830LE machine, has an embroidery field of 10" x 15 3/4").  However, free motion quilting is a skill that I really want to master, because then I could quilt any design I wanted without having to first find or create a digitized embroidery file or wrestling to hoop an unwieldy quilt.  That reminds me -- I really need to call that quilt shop in Concord and reschedule my free motion quilting class!

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.