UFO Laid to Rest At Last: Anders' Celestial Double Nine Patch Quilt, 2003-2012

Anders' "Celestial Double Nine Patch," 2003-2012

Have you ever come back to a quilt nine years later to finish it up?  That's what I did yesterday and today with this double nine patch quilt.  I "finished" it the month that Anders was born, and it was his baby quilt.  It has probably been through the wash at least 30 times, and all of the metallic accents in the fabric have long since washed away.  This quilt has been folded up in my son's closet for several years now, but I decided to take it out and add some free motion quilting to it for two reasons.  First, I always thought it needed more quilting, but I just didn't feel up to the challenge and was afraid I'd mess up and ruin the quilt back in 2003.  Now that the quilt has served its purpose and lives in a closet full time, those fears didn't seem so insurmountable after all. 

To recap, the diagonal grid quilting and the decorative motifs in the centers of the alternate blocks were both quilted in 2003, using a walking foot for the grid and a digitized quilting motif stitched "in the hoop" with my embroidery module.  This week (nine years later!) I added this squiggly back-and-forth free motion quilting around the decorative motifs, to fill in dead space as well as just to get some more free motion practice under my belt before going back to Lars's "Drunken Dragons" quilt. 

FMQ Squiggles Added around Embroidered Center Motif

I think I will be able to use this back-and-forth squiggle quilting in the corners of the drunkard's path blocks, so stay tuned to see how that turns out in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, I'm linking up to Amy Lou Who's Sew and Tell Friday.  It feels good to have finished something this week!

Back Under the Needle: My 2003 Double 9-Patch Quilt

My "Celestial Double Nine Patch" Quilt from 2003, Back Under the Needle for More Quilting!

In August 2003, soon after Anders was born, I finished my second-ever quilt, this "crib sized" double nine patch that I spread out on the floor for him as a play mat before he was even rolling over.  It's 51" x 51" and I got the pattern and beginner-friendly instructions from the book Quilts! Quilts! Quilts! by Diana McClun and Laura Nownes.  This is the quilt that was folded up underneath the stroller for trips to the mall, and this is the quilt that was used as a "beach blanket" when the preschool held its annual end-of-year party with inflatable kiddy pools on the lawn outside the church.  Let's just say it's been through the wash a few times!

Bernie with Anders, June 2006

I was very proud of my piecing skills on this quilt, especially on the narrow sawtooth border, but I was intimidated by the quilting part.  I quilted a diagonal grid over the nine patch blocks with my walking foot, but that left those big, blank 9" alternate blocks that cried out for something fancy.  I used my embroidery module to quilt the decorative motifs "in the hoop," but even after enlarging the design to the maximum stitchable area of my machine's largest hoop, it was still way too small to fill the blocks properly.  I vaguely remember lowering the feed dogs of my sewing machine, experimenting briefly with free motion quilting on scraps of fabric and batting, and flinging the ugly results across the room in horror.  Apart from aesthetic concerns about the unbalanced quilting, I wanted to be sure to meet the batting manufacturer's guidelines about how far apart to space quilting lines.  So I put my walking foot back on, and added awkward-looking straight lines radiating from the horizontal and vertical centers and corners of each motif.  I didn't love the way that looked, but it was the best I could do at that time, and I was terrified to try any free motion quilting that might "mess up" my beautiful quilt top.

Now that this quilt has been folded away in the closet for several years, I finally decided to pull it out and add some free motion quilting around those motifs.  My confidence was bolstered when I found one of those early FMQ practice samples in my sewing room and saw how much I had improved already, so I threaded up my machine with the same variegated 40 weight cotton quilting thread I'd used originally and chose the quilting design I feel most comfortable with at the moment -- back and forth squiggle lines.  Why oh why did I put this off for so long?  Free motion quilting is FUN!

Upper Left Block Finished, Lower Right Block Awaiting FMQ Squiggles

My squiggles aren't perfect by a long shot, and the brightly colored thread shows every "oops" up close, but nothing jumps out at me horribly when I step back and look at the quilt as a whole.  For my next quilt, I'm going to choose a thread color that blends in better.  Anyway, I worked on this for about an hour yesterday and was able to squiggle-quilt half of the twelve alternate blocks.  Once I got into the groove of it, the quilting went much faster than expected.  I plan to finishe the remaining blocks today, and then tomorrow I think I will be ready to add some diagonal FMQ squiggling to the outer block corners of Lars's "Drunken Dragons" (drunkard's path) quilt-in-progress.  By the time I finish this nine patch quilt my squiggles should be much smoother and more even, right? 

Meanwhile, I've got a piano lesson in 20 minutes so I'd better scoot.  Have a wonderful day!

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!

High-Tech Quilting: Editing a Digitized Quilting Motif with Artista Embroidery Software

Bernina Artista v6 Embroidery Software

Well, I finished my last mastery class today for the Bernina Artista version 6 embroidery design software.  Today's class went over the quilt design program within the embroidery software.  I don't think it's as powerful as the Electric Quilt 7 software, but the Artista quilting program would be a good "test drive" to see if I like designing quilts on the computer.

The embroidery software is really cool, and does so much more than I'll ever use it for.  We really just got an overview of the software in the mastery classes.  Bernie printed out the 586 page PDF online help manual for me, and I know I'll be marking it up with notes and referring to it often.  The most immediate benefit I got out of taking these embroidery software classes right now was that I figured out how to delete half of a professionally digitized quilt motif so I can use it on the half blocks at the edges of Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt.

The design I selected for the center of the circles on this quilt is from from retired OESD Collection 788, Quilting Inspirations by Keryn Emmerson, and I've enlarged it to completely fill the width of my largest embroidery hoop.  Then I edited the design, deleting everything on the right half, one node at a time:

Deleting the unwanted portion of the design in my Artista software, one node at a time

This is what I ended up with:

Ta Da!  Half Design Completed

As you can see, the design has a heavy vertical line at what is now the right edge.  That's because the design consisted of closed objects that wanted to remain closed objects.  I went in and deleted lots of individual stitches, so now that heavy line is more like long jump stitches that I'll be able to trim as I go.  If everything is positioned correctly, the quilt binding should line right up at the edge of this design.

Sample Stitched in Invisible Nylon Monofilament

I saved the designs to a USB stick, plugged it into my sewing machine, and stitched out both versions, the full circle and the half circle.  (I used the ugliest fabric in my stash, John Deere Tractors from Lars's preschool tractor phase).  Both versions stitched out beautifully with the needle tension reduced to 1.5 for the monofilament nylon thread in the needle.  Here's the thing, though -- it was so disappointing to have the design stitch perfectly on my sample, and only be able to SEE it on the BACK! 

Same Sample, Back Side Showing 60 wt Cotton Bobbin Thread

I'm now considering using one of my pretty variegated quilting threads in the needle for the quilting inside the circles, staying with the 60 weight cotton Mettler embroidery thread in the bobbin that I've been using all along.  I'll have to stitch some more samples and play around with that before I start stitching this design on the quilt, one circle at a time.  The variegated threads come in 40 weight, which is a lot heavier than the 60 weight thread in my bobbin.  I could just use a pretty blue or orange solid thread in the needle instead, to reduce potential tension issues.  Since this portion of the quilting process is going to be completely computerized, there shouldn't be any "oopses" that need to be hidden with invisible thread.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

Bernina Embroidery Software v6: Manual Digitizing Homework

Bernina Embroidery Software Homework Completed!

Ta da!  Behold, my completed manual digitizing homework for my Bernina Artista Embroidery Software v6 class!  We started with this palm tree artwork (seen below) in the background, and built the embroidery design one object at a time, with right-clicks and left-clicks and stitch angles, oh my!  This simple exercize took me several hours to complete, both inside and outside the classroom.  I have new appreciation for the talents and abilities of professional digitizers!

Palm Tree Artwork Used in this Exercize

I am not going to bother with stitching my wonky palm tree out on the machine.  Truth be told, I doubt I would ever go to all the trouble of creating an embroidery design completely from scratch.  The software manual is almost 600 pages long; it's pretty complicated stuff.  I mostly use my embroidery software for combining or editing professional designs, or for embroidering with lettering.  Still, it's good to go through all the classes because you never know where you might pick up a useful morsel of information.  For instance, on the Drunken Dragons quilt that I'm temporarily avoiding, I was planning to use my embroidery module to quilt fancy designs in the center of each pieced circle, but wasn't sure how to handle the half circles on the edges of the quilt.  I learned that I can open the professional quilting design in my embroidery software, convert the embroidery design to vectors, use the eraser tool to erase half of the quilting motif, and then reconvert it to embroidery and save as a new design to use on those half circles.  So that's one hurdle that I can deal with -- if only I can get the free motion quilting down so I can stitch in the ditch on the curved circular seamline!

I should send my kids to the classes and have them learn how to use the software.  They'd be scanning in pictures of Lego Ninjago warrios and filling them in with all kinds of funky stitch patterns!  Speaking of Lars and Anders, they have been busy performers lately.  They were in four performances of Beauty and the Beast Jr. at their school last week, and their piano recital was earlier this afternoon.  They will be performing on their recorder (Anders) and trombone (Lars) with their classes again on Tuesday evening for the school's annual Night of the Arts, and I understand they will each have artwork for sale prior to the concert.  Busy, busy boys!

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!

Ice Berg, Dead Ahead! Approaching the Perils of the Quilting Phase, and the Band Plays On

The Titannic, image found here

Well, Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt top is nearly complete.  (If you missed the earlier posts about this project, click here to catch up).  I just have to assemble the last of the 15 rows of blocks, then attach that row to the others.  I decided to assemble the quilt top in thirds (five rows per section) to minimize fraying along the raw edges, so I'll have to join the three sections together, and then the piecing stage of the 70" x 105" twin bed quilt will be complete.  After that, I'll join my two widths of the backing fabric together and make and attach the quilt label to the backing so it will be quilted in securely. 


Scrabble fabric from Quilting Treasures, photo from Fabric.com

I am excited about the quilt label; I'm going to spell out "MOMMY LOVES LARS" in Scrabble fabric, cutting out each letter with a seam allowance so I can stitch them together like a Scrabble board. 

The scary part comes next. Depending on the quilting design, I may have to do some marking on the quilt top -- always a terrifying prospect, because what if the marks don't wash out afterwards like they're supposed to?  "They" tell you to test the washaway marking pen on every fabric in your quilt to be sure it will wash out afterwards, but I used so many fabrics...  Also, I would have needed to make up my little marking pen tests on fabric scraps a couple of weeks ago to do this, because it's going to take me at least that long to do the quilting.  Just because the ink comes out after it's been on the fabric for a day doesn't mean that it would come out after three weeks.  Anyway, I'm not marking anything until I know for sure how I want to do the quilting.

So far, this quilt has been pretty smooth sailing, like the Titannic, speeding across the Atlantic Ocean with its sparkling chandeliers and happy passengers, but we're about to enter dangerous waters...  Nothing like a positive attitude, don't you agree?  Here's what's going through my mind as I stare out into the frigid, frosty darkness of the quilting voyage that lies ahead:

Machine Trapunto by Anita Shakelford

My first thought is to stitch a grid of diagonal lines as background quilting everywhere except inside the circles.  The circles would have concentric, fairly wide spaced circle quilting for emphasis.  To make the circles stand out even more, I could add trapunto to the circles (an extra layer of batting just under the circles for added dimension) using the method that Diane Gaudynski describes in her books.  I'd use my walking foot for the background grid, but the circles?  Well...  I can't very well turn my quilt around 360 degrees under my sewing machine needle to quilt each circle with the walking foot, not on this oversized twin bed quilt.  The line of quilting that goes right in the circular seamline would be challenging to execute even with a walking foot -- do I really think I can do that accurately with the feed dogs down and the training wheels off?  Am I really going to be able to quilt perfect circles with FMQ?  I've jokingly dubbed this the Drunken Dragons quilt because the block pattern is called Drunkard's Path, but I don't want people to look at the finished quilt, covered with wobbly, crookedy lumpy-non-circular blobs and think I was drunk when I was quilting it!

I've been telling everyone how I'm going to do free-motion quilting (FMQ) on this project in hopes that I won't chicken out, but I feel a cold sweat coming on. For those who don't know, normally the feed dogs on the sewing machine pull your fabric through at a steady pace beneath the stationary needle going up and down to create stitches of exactly the same length.  When you do free-motion quilting, you disengage those feed dogs so you can control the fabric movement with your hands, enabling you to go back and forth, diagonally, sideways, all without turning your fabric.  It's like trying to draw a picture or sign your name by moving a piece of paper around underneath a stationary marker, except that you also have to be careful to move the quilt at a steady speed so you don't end up with a mess of some really long stitches, some really short stitches, and a bunch of knots.  With a lot of practice, people like Diane Gaudynski and Wendy Sheppard are able to quilt the most exquisite designs using this method, but my experience with FMQ so far looks like I tried to doodle with my left hand, blindfolded. 

Bernina Stitch Regulator, from Bernina USA

I have a gizmo for my fancy computerized sewing machine that is supposed to help -- the BSR function (Bernina Stitch Regulator) has a little Doctor Evil laser thingy that scans and counts threads next to the needle as I'm moving the fabric, speeding up or slowing down the needle movement as needed to keep stitches around the same length.  But BSR doesn't improve my ability to "draw" by moving fabric, it only helps to keep stitch length more or less consistent.  If I'm really going to drop those feed dogs and quilt without training wheels, then I'd better set the quilt top aside and do at least a week of practice quilting before I even mark the quilt top. I'd hate to mark an overly ambitious design on my quilt top and then realize I'm not skilled enough to execute it well. I'm looking at this quilt top, and not really coming up with a lot of FMQ ideas that would look good on this quilt and that I'm likely to be able to do well.  I mean honestly, circles?  I really WANT circles, though.  I may have to plan a smaller project, like a table runner, for FMQ practice.

Anders' Froggy Quilt of Many Colors, Decorative Quilting Motif Stitched with Embroidery Module, 2006

So there's this cunning little voice in the back of my head, and I can't tell for sure if she's an angel or the Devil. She says there's no shame in using all the high-tech gadgetry at my disposal in order to finish the quilt and get it on Lars's bed, looking the way I want it to look, and finished within this lifetime. I have several design collections of Keryn Emmerson's outline quilting designs that I could use with the embroidery module of my sewing machine to insure good looking results using fancier designs than I could manage free hand.  When I've used this method in the past, most notably for Anders' Froggy Quilt of Many Colors above (I know, I should have done more quilting on the Flying Geese patches and I still might add more later), I got annoying little thread knots on the back of the quilt (which, thanks to Diane's book, I now know could have been minimized by using a lighter weight quilting thread).  I just found a Bernina Through the Needle: Quilting in the Hoop article that suggests using these outline embroidery designs on just the quilt top and batting for the decorative stitching, then adding the backing fabric before doing the background quilting through all three layers, so that any tension snafus or knots gets hidden between the layers of the quilt.  I guess I'd need to use an adhesive basting spray to adhere the quilt top to the batting if I'm going to do some of the quilting before I layer and pin-baste all three layers together, though -- ugh, this is getting complicated again!  I wonder if this is like that moment when Captain Edward Smith ordered his crew to increase the Titanic's speed just as they were approaching the ice they'd been warned about?  I mean, is this going to make my project go more smoothly, or will this plan of action come back to haunt me in my dreams? 

Here are a couple of the quilting designs I'm considering for the circles on this quilt:

Keryn Emmerson's Continuous Quilting Designs collection for Bernina

 I like that Celtic knot circle design shown on the cover of the design collection packaging, but it's too small so I'd want to enlarge it and then add some additional wide-spaced circle outlines.  This particular collection is on one of those design cards that plugs directly into my sewing machine rather than on a CD, and although I can resize the design directly on my sewing machine, I'm pretty sure I need to use my PC software to add additional outline circles.  I may be able to do this if I open the design on my sewing machine, save it to the sewing machine's memory, and then copy it from there to a thumb drive that I take downstairs to my PC. 

Another Keryn Emmerson design from her Quilting Inspirations 788 Collection for OESD

The design shown above is another possibility, and even though it's also too small to fill the big circles on my quilt, perhaps I could stitch them out as-is and then add some FMQ echo quilting.  Since this design is so angular and irregular, the echo quilting wouldn't need to be perfect in order to look good.  But I really, really want circles...

I did some browsing over at Embroidery.com (even though I hate to buy more embroidery designs when I have SO MANY that I already own and have never used), and found another possibility:

Rangoli design from Embroidery.com, get it here

I like the circles in the Rangoli design at left from Embroidery.com, and even though at 3.5" it's again, a little on the small side, I could easily resize it larger to fit, and the stitching looks like it would be open enough to allow the quilt to puff up between the stitches.

Alternatively, I should also be able to digitize my original concentric circle idea myself fairly easily with my Bernina Embroidery Software, but I upgraded from Version 4 to Version 6 last year and have not been able to take classes from my dealer yet to learn how to use the new version.  It's completely different than the older version, because Version 6 has a baby version of CorelDRAW for digitizing from scratch and when I fooled around with it last night I wasn't able to figure out how to use the circle tool.  However, I was able to find the handouts for the Version 6 Software Mastery classes online, which I printed out, and I also managed to send the colossal on-screen software owner's manual PDF to my iPad so I can read it in my Kindle app -- but it doesn't navigate as easily as a Kindle book would, and I'm not able to use the hilighting or annotating functions.  This is so irritating -- I want a real, physical owner's manual that I can highlight, write notes in, and cover with Post-It flags to help me find the right information quickly when I need it again!  I know some users have paid to have a local printer print the whole thing out in multiple spiral bound volumes...  Ugh.  Bernina, are you listening?  I want an owner's manual next time!!!  So anyway, there is going to be a little software learning curve, and I have a few hundred pages of boring technical reading ahead of me, but it's doable -- and I need to learn how to use that software anyway or else it will be a huge waste of money.

Monofilament Nylon Thread from SewArt International

Finally, just when you thought I was finished with this smorgasbord of anxiety-inducing possibilities, we come to the question of thread.  I wasn't thrilled with the look of the heavier-weight "machine quilting thread" I used on Anders' quilt.  I've considered using the lighter-weight cotton or silk threads recommended by Wendy Sheppard and Diane Gaudynski.  But I'm leaning toward a .004 nylon monofilament quilting thread from Sew Art International for this project.  I have a lot of busy fabrics in this quilt, and I don't think I want the quilting thread to stand out and scream at anyone.  Plus, invisible nylon should hide my oopses and glitches better than any other thread, and it will enable me to quilt in that Scrabble label without scribbling all over it with the quilting thread. I have this thread in both clear and a smoke color, and I haven't decided which color to use yet.  I've never used the monofilament nylon thread before (it's a maiden voyage -- just like the Titanic!), and I'm nervous about the thread snarling, snapping, or otherwise misbehaving, but I'm going to do my research as far as tension settings and practice before I tackle the Real Deal.

Ready to Go: Final Blocks Awaiting Assembly

I can worry about all of this some more while I stitch those remaining blocks together today, since they aren't going to sew themselves.  After all, it's not a real quilt until somebody gets an ulcer.  Isn't that what they always say?  Well, that's what they should say.  Meanwhile, the band plays on...