Using Stencils to Develop Muscle Memory for Long Arm Quilting, Part One

My DIY Stencils, from Designs in Judi Madsen's book

No quilting to show you yet, but I've been planning and experimenting this week with stencils for my Spirit Song quilt, and I think this is going to work.  Woo hoo!  

Both of the designs on these DIY stencils shown above were resized and traced from quilting designs that were on the CD that came with Judi Madsen's Quilting Wide Open Spaces book, available on Amazon here.  

My Spirit Song Quilt, Waiting Patiently on the Frame

I know that some of you will look at this quilt and say that I should have just gone with an allover pantograph and moved on, so I should probably explain that Spirit Song is a practice quilt that I'm making specifically for developing my long arm quilting skills.  I got lots of SID (Stitch in the Ditch) practice with all of these seams, and I can tell you that my SID was a lot better by the time I got to the bottom edge of the quilt than it was when I started at the top.  Now I'm looking at how I can complete this quilt with ruler work and very basic free motion motifs.  

Muscle Memory: How Using Stencils Can Speed Up Learning for Free Motion Quilting

Some people advocate that the best way to learn to quilt smooth, even free motion motifs is to just "go for it" and try your best, covering a dozen -- or a hundred -- quilts with lumpy, wobbly quilting that will gradually improve from one quilt to the next if you just keep at it.  But this doesn't make sense to me, from an education theory perspective.  The more time I spend quilting misshapen ogre toe feathers on my quilts, the more I am ingraining the muscle memory for ogre toe feathers and the more difficult I am making it to unlearn and correct bad habits.  Wouldn't it be better to practice quilting smooth, evenly spaced, nicely rounded loops and feathers from the very beginning?  Consider how penmanship and figure skating have been taught for hundreds of years:

Remember How We Learned Cursive?

Remember these worksheets from elementary school?  Our teachers had us trace over perfectly formed cursive letters so that we could develop the muscle memory we would need to recreate these shapes on our own.  Penmanship practice develops muscle memory using our fine motor skills, but operating a long arm quilting machine requires a similar level of control using the larger muscle groups in our upper arms and shoulders... That's why I can draw beautiful loops and feathers on my iPad or on paper that I am not able to recreate with my long arm machine.  I'm using totally different muscles, gross motor skills involving coordination of my shoulders, torso, and upper arms rather than fine motor skills of just my hand.  Which reminds me of how figure skaters learn to precisely and exquisitely control and coordinate large muscle groups for compulsory figures.  Check out the surface of the ice after a figure skating competition -- if I had that level of control with my quilting machine, I could free motion quilt ANYTHING!

Skating Rink After Compulsory Figures Competition

Figure skaters learn by first etching circles, figure eights, and other patterns onto the ice using a scribe (like a giant compass) and then they practice skating over the etched lines again and again as they developed the gross motor muscle memory for skating these shapes in competition.

Free motion quilting with a long arm machine on a frame has got to be somewhere in between learning to write in cursive and learning figure skating, don't you think?  That's why I'm exploring options for marking some basic free motion designs onto the surface of my quilt.  The idea is that, if I mark and "trace" these designs all over my quilt today, I will develop the muscle memory faster for quilting these shapes in the future without having to mark them at all.

Both of the designs on these DIY stencils shown above were resized and traced from quilting designs that were on the CD that came with Judi Madsen's Quilting Wide Open Spaces book, available on Amazon here.  

The first design I've selected for my Spirit Song quilt is the one that Judi quilted in the white squares below on her Crossroads quilt, the featherlike swirls that radiate around those blocks:

Quilting Detail of Crossroads, by Judi Madsen

I enlarged that design to fit the space on my quilt, and just traced one line for each curl.  Now, this might seem like a silly design to need to mark before quilting, but marking this will help me get consistent spacing and angles for the feather curls as I travel around the block, quilting the design in four different directions, and it should help build muscle memory for all sorts of different feathers in the future.  Training wheels, baby!  By the way, if I was not using a stencil for this design but was nervous about stitching it freehand, I could also draw the feather curl guidelines freehand with a purple or blue erasable fabric marker.  Transferring the lines with a stencil is much faster and will ensure that the feather curls at the bottom of the quilt are consistent with the curls I was making at the top of the quilt.

Enlarged to Fit Here On My Spirit Song Quilt

When I quilt this design, I'll be traveling up each curved line to the swirled tip on one side of the marked line, and then quilting back down on the other side of the line.  After printing the design on my computer at the correct size for my block, I used an ultra fine point Sharpie marker to trace the swirls (along with registration marks) onto translucent 24# vellum that I found squirreled away in my office supplies.  Then I S-L-O-W-L-Y stitched along the lines I'd drawn using an old needle and no thread in my sewing machine.  This is one of those times when speed kills, because the lines that get marked on the quilt are only going to be as accurate as the holes created by your sewing machine needle!  Going around that inner curl was one stitch, pivot, another stitch, pivot, repeat FOREVER...

Making My Vellum Quilting Stencil

So, although I'm happy with my stencil and I think it will work great for me, it is definitely worth shelling out a couple of dollars for a premade stencil if you can find one in the right design and the correct size for your project.  It could take hours to make your own stencil for a really elaborate design.  To make my stencil, I'm using a size 75/11 needle with stitch length 1.5, and I did have to turn off the upper thread break indicator on my Bernina since I'm running the machine without any thread.  (With my first try, I had a beefy size 90/14 jeans needle, but found that to result in a chalk line on my quilt that was thicker than necessary).

Finished!

What's nice about the 24 lb. vellum for making stencils is that it's light enough to stitch through easily, yet sturdy and rigid enough that the holes don't close up as easily as paper when you rub over the stencil with your pounce chalk, and it's not going to tear easily.  And I love that I can see through it, which is crucial for aligning motifs precisely where you want them on your quilt.

Auditioning Quilting Ideas on my iPad

Not sure how well you can see the quilting doodles on the image above.  The blocks with red X's on them are ideas I was trying out that I've decided against, and the blocks outlined in bright yellow are the ideas I'm feeling good about at the moment.  

Can You See It Better Here?

My idea for quilting this is that I want to create the illusion that my quilt is comprised of two alternating blocks set on the diagonal rather than one straight set block, emphasizing the secondary design created where the blocks meet up at the corners.  

This is the 16 inch Block in My Quilt, Made From Four Birds In the Air Blocks

I have a combination of  straight line ruler work and freehand curvy designs in each quilting design, and I've tried to keep the quilting density fairly constant.  The off-white fabrics will be quilted more densely than the blue and peach/pink/corals, making those areas recede visually.  Now, I know I'd get better dimension in the less-quilted areas if I was using a wool or double batting for this piece, but since it's just for practice and I already have enough variables in play, I'm just going with a single layer of Quilter's Dream Cotton Select.  As of right now, I'm planning to use pale peach Superior So Fine 50 weight thread in the needle with 60 weight Bottom Line in the bobbin for all of the peach/pink/coral fabrics, and then switch to an off-white thread for the background fills.  Those little blue triangles are a bit problematic, because they would be easier to quilt without a gazillion thread breaks if I quilted them at the same time as the pink/peach/corals, or at the same time as the off-white background fills.  So, we'll see what happens when I start quilting!

Anyway, today's post about why I'm using stencils and how I made my own is Part One.  In a day or two, I'm hoping to share with you my experiments with using different brands of chalk powder to transfer the DIY stencils to my quilt, a few different kinds of commercially made stencil options, and how to keep the design from smudging or bouncing off the quilt surface before stitching is complete.  That will be Part Two.

I'm linking today's post up with the following linky parties:

·       Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

·       Free Motion Mavericks at Quilting & Learning Combo OR at Lizzie Lenard Vintage Sewing

Hey, Has Anyone Used Stencils for Long Arm Quilting?

So today is May 1st, and I've not put a single stitch of quilting into my Spirit Song quilt since the rip-stitching I wrote about a few days ago.  Finishing the quilting was supposed to be my One Monthly Goal in the studio for April, so clearly that didn't happen -- but I'm not just going to throw a bunch of stitches into a quilt to meet an imaginary deadline.  

Sad Spirit Song: No Further Quilting Progress to Report

Since my original quilting plan didn't work for me, I've got to figure out WHAT I want to quilt before I can start quilting it.  I pulled out all of my quilting books and spent an hour or two flipping through them on the floor of my studio yesterday afternoon.  

It's not that I can't think of anything to quilt on this quilt.  I can think of LOTS of things to quilt on this quilt that would look great -- the problem is that my favorite ideas are "advanced skill level," and I was having trouble coming up with something that:

1. Complements my quilt top
2. Challenges me enough to develop my long arm quilting skills (since that is the one and only reason for making this quilt in the first place)
3. I need an attainable design for where I am right now, not more ideas to attempt and rip out of the quilt.  Basically, to use a mathematics teaching analogy, I'm beyond subtraction and addition, but not yet ready for calculus.  I need to work through some algebra first!

Plan B: Consult My Personal Quilting Library

Looking for Quilting Inspiration From My Favorite Quilt Authors

I keep coming back to Judi Madsen's first book, Quilting Wide Open Spaces.  What I like about the designs in this particular book is that they look fabulous on quilts, yet they are basic repetitive lines and shapes that are the building blocks for more complicated designs.  I was delighted to discover that all of these designs are on the CD that came with the book, making them easy to print out in the sizes that I need.

These Designs Came On a CD with Judi Madsen's book, Quilting Wide Open Spaces

Plan C: Consult My EQ8 Quilt Design Software

Quilting Stencils Can Be Selected and Overlaid on a Quilt Design in Layer 3 of EQ8

Finding that CD of quilting designs in the back of one of my books reminded me that my EQ8 quilt design software includes a selection of quilting stencils in the block library that I haven't paid much attention to before.  So I went down that rabbit hole, exploring the quilting design "stencils" in my EQ Block Library and auditioning them on my quilt.  An advantage of printing quilting designs from EQ8 software over using designs from books is that, in EQ8, I type in the exact size I want to print the stencil design, in inches or millimeters, and it prints out exactly the right size the first time.  There is no trial and error (or wasting of paper and ink) involved in figuring out how much to enlarge/reduce/scale percentages.  Also, the line width is going to remain constant in an EQ printed design, whereas significantly enlarging a printed pattern without software can give you a very thick, blurry line that isn't as easy to follow precisely.  However, none of the stencil designs built into EQ8 really wowed me for my quilt.  Most of them are better suited for hand quilting as they are not continuous line designs.

Plan D: Does EQ Have More Stencil Designs Available for Download?

Electric Quilt  also sells CDs with hundreds of resizable quilt stencil designs from Quiltmaker magazine.  There are seven different "volumes" available for purchase, each containing over 500 resizable designs, and the CDs can be used by themselves to print designs even if you don't own the EQ quilt design software.  For those who do own EQ software, the designs on the Quiltmaker CDs can be imported your EQ8 block library so that you can actually preview them on your quilt the way I was doing with the built in stencil designs in the screen shot above.  I saw a lot of design possibilities that I could see myself using on this project and on future projects, and honestly, if they sold it as a digital download for instant gratification, I probably would have purchased Volume 7 yesterday.  However, I'm not interested enough right this minute that I'm going to order a CD and wait for it to show up in my mailbox.  After all, I still haven't figured out how I'm going to get any of these designs onto my quilt fabric so I can actually quilt them!

Over 500 Printable Stencil Designs on each Quilting Designs CD from Electric Quilt

All of these stencil designs I've been talking about are just line drawings to print out on paper, and not digitized designs that can program your machine to stitch automatically.  My APQS Millennium is not computerized, so I'm looking for a way to get these designs marked onto my quilt as a guide that I will manually "trace over" with hand-guided quilting stitches, removing the marked guidelines after the quilting is complete.  I need to turn the drawing into a stencil and then use the stencil to mark the design onto my quilt.  

If I was working on a quilt where I'd planned out all of the quilting ahead of time, and the intricate quilting designs were destined for light-colored fabrics in my quilt, I might have decided to trace all of the quilting designs onto the quilt top before loading it, using my light box and one of those fine point fabric markers that disappears when you wash the quilt or spritz it with water.  

Marking Mission Impossible Before Loading, Against Hard Surface of Cutting Table

With Lars's Mission Impossible graduation quilt, I marked my straight line designs on the entire quilt top using rulers and a white Clover heat erasable marking pen, pressing down against the hard surface of my cutting table beneath the single fabric layer of my quilt top.  But in this case, the quilt is already puffy (stitched through all three layers along the seam lines) and it's suspended in the air between the rollers of my long arm frame like a hammock.  I need to use some kind of stencil that will allow me to mark the designs from the top, a method that doesn't require a hard surface beneath my project in order for the marks to show up well.

How Do I Make a Stencil From These Designs, Anyway?

Stencils have been around for a LONG time, and there are tutorials for making DIY mylar stencils with an X-acto knife in several of my older quilting books as well as all over the Internet.  Reading over some of these, I began to have ugly flashbacks of having tried this in  the past.  If memory serves, this method is best suited to very basic designs, not anything as intricate as what I'm wanting to mark on my quilt, and those X-acto knife blades are super dangerous.  You have to cut channels through the plastic wide enough for a marking pen or pencil to fit through, leaving little bridges so the shapes don't fall right out of your stencil, and if you make a mistake your whole stencil is ruined and you have to start over. Hence the widespread popularity of commercially produced quilting stencils in a vast assortment of styles and sizes:

Commercially Made Quilting Stencils in 3 Sizes, available here on Etsy

Honestly, if this is the kind of stencil I want, I should probably choose a premade stencil and just skip ahead to the marking and quilting, if I can find a suitable design in the correct size to fit my quilt block.  Commercially made stencils are very inexpensive, costing just a few dollars each, and it is near impossible to cut them out your own stencil with a craft knife with the same accuracy and smooth lines.  The drawback of the commercial stencils, of course, is that you are limited to the designs and sizes for sale in your local quilt shop, or what's available on the Internet to order, and if you purchase a design to use for 6" blocks today, you cannot use that same stencil to mark the designs on 9" blocks on a future quilt.  Often the design you like the most is not even available in the block size you need.  Which is why anyone bothers to make their own stencils in the first place!

 

As I'm writing this, I'm wondering -- do those Cricut or Silhouette craft cutting machines that so many quilters love have the ability to take a line drawing (like the ones on the Electric Quilt CD or on the CD that came with Judi Madsen's book) and cut them into stencil plastic for you?  If you own one of these machines, please chime in via the comments.  I could only find information about cutting stencils onto adhesive vinyl for painting projects in my quick Google search on that topic.

Another Option: Full Line Quilting Stencils With Chalk Powder

I discovered another kind of stencil that is new to me and kind of interesting.  It's Full Line Stencils from Hancy Manufacturing, and instead of being made of mylar with channels cut for the design, it's made of a flexible, high-tech nylon mesh material.  The design lines are continuous, without the breaks in traditional stencil lines, because the line is perforated with many tiny holes that a marking chalk like Pounce can be worked through onto your fabric.  It looks very cool in the demo videos, but of course the downside is that you cannot use any kind of marking pen or pencil with this type of stencil, only chalk powder.

Full Line Stencils for use with Powdered Chalk

What really makes these stencils appealing to me is the range of designs offered -- designs that I would actually want to use on quilts more than once, and designs that would be very useful to "trace" with the long arm machine in order to develop the muscle memory for doing them freehand.  Remember when we were little and they had us trace over the shapes of perfect cursive letters before we practiced drawing the letters ourselves?  Same concept.  So no, professional longarm quilters are not going to draw out every feather of their border before quilting it -- maybe they'd mark the feather spine and a few registration points, then they'd quilt the feathers freehand.

Nine Inch Wide Feather Border Stencil from Full Line Stencils

Several things make freehand feathers difficult for beginners.  First, getting the angles right for each feather, and maintaining the same angle for each feather even as you're quilting feathers in different directions along a curve.  I like how the Full Line stencils give you a line to follow that starts right at the spine, before you have a chance to start quilting a sideways feather that looks like an ogre toe.  The second difficulty is getting those smooth, rounded curves to each feather on a long arm machine that moves more easily on the true horizontal or vertical than it does on the diagonal.  Rounded shapes come out looking a little square for beginners, so quilting over nicely rounded curves marked onto your quilt with this stencil should help a new quilter to learn to compensate for that.  If I buy this stencil, I will design a small practice quilt with a big, wide border, just so I can use this stencil for feather practice.  Even if the size and proportions of this stencil weren't appropriate for other quilts down the road, I think it would be worth the $13 just for the practice.

Ribbon Candy Stencil from Full Line Stencils

The Ribbon Candy stencil shown above is another one that I think would be good for "training wheels."  Like feathers, this is a design that seasoned quilters can knock out fairly quickly without any marking at all.  The stencil looks kind of boring, but look how pretty it looks quilted into a narrow border or sashing in this quilt by Kathleen Riggins of Kathleen Quilts (via Instagram):

Beautiful Ribbon Candy Quilting by Kathleen Riggins of Kathleen Quilts

Even when I'm just doodling on my iPad, I have trouble keeping my ribbon candy straight with rounded "knobs" on both sides, especially when I'm drawing it on a diagonal.  I get leaning ribbon candy and ribbon candy that is rounded on one side but flattened on the other side.  Being able to quickly mark a chalk guideline for ribbon candy would be a huge help. like tracing around those beautiful, perfect cursive letters in first grade.

So these stencils are promising, IF I can figure out how to use them successfully to mark a quilt that is already loaded onto my longarm frame.  The process looks very straightforward in the tutorials, but they are just transferring the design onto a single layer of fabric on a hard tabletop surface, and they talk about needing to press the chalk down through the stencil holes.  I know that I tried something similar with a DIY stencil and chalk on my Tabby Mountain Disco Kitties quilt two years ago, and the experiment ended in failure.  

Attempted DIY Feather Stencil for My Tabby Mountain Disco Kitties

However, I don't remember if the failure was that I couldn't get my homemade stencil to transfer a clear chalk line onto my already-loaded quilt, or if the failure happened when I attempted to quilt the little feather design after marking it.  I've gone digging back through all of my old blog posts during the time I was working on this quilt, and I can't believe I didn't write about why I wasn't able to mark and quilt these feather designs on that quilt!  Well, two things I'm noticing immediately, looking at this photo today.  First of all, the design is still too big for the block.  It would look better if the feather edges were about a quarter of an inch inside the seam lines.  Second, I traced the feather design onto my template plastic the same way I would have traced appliqué templates -- as close to the edges of the template plastic as possible, to minimize waste.  If I'm going to poke holes through the design lines and then swipe chalk powder across the stencil to transfer the design, I need more of a buffer of extra template plastic around the design or else excess chalk is going to get all over my quilt!  If I did manage to get the design marked clearly and had trouble quilting along the marked lines, that could have been due to the jerky, unpredictable operation of my stitch regulation prior to replacing my encoders (I did not realize my machine was not working properly until I'd been struggling with it for a year and a half).  It could also have been that I was trying to reach too far into the long arm frame to quilt the design instead of backing up the quilt on the frame to put the area I was quilting where I could reach it comfortably (something I learned in Lisa Calle's long arm quilting workshop.  Just because your machine has a deep throat does not mean you have full control for detailed quilting when the machine is all the way at the back of the frame by the dead bar!).

My Friend's Cat, Finn, Enjoying His Disco Kitties Quilt

Coincidentally, my friend texted me this picture of her cat snuggled up with this very same Tabby Mountain Disco Kitties quilt today, right while I was going through the old posts about making it.  So sweet!  I'm always glad to see photographic evidence that one of my gifted quilts is being used and appreciated!  

So, What Does All This Mean for Spirit Song?

Back to the Quilt du Jour!

So, back to the current quilt.  I think I'm going to try making some DIY chalk stencils of a couple of the Judi Madsen designs, by tracing them onto translucent vellum (I don't have any of that projector transparency stuff on hand) and stitching over the traced lines with an unthreaded needle on my home sewing machine to perforate them.  I picked up one of those little foam paint brushes yesterday when I was at Lowe's, because I've heard that can help with more precise application of the chalk powder than what you get with the pounce pad that comes with the chalk.  Wish me luck!  And of course, since I am curious, I did order a few of those Full Line stencils to try out on a future project.  Hopefully Spirit Song will be finished by the time the stencils show up in the mail!

Have YOU used stencils successfully for marking designs on your quilts?  I'd love to hear about what works for you -- let me know in the comments!

I'm linking up today's post with:

·       Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

·       Free Motion Mavericks at Quilting & Learning Combo OR at Lizzie Lenard Vintage Sewing

·      Whoop Whoop Fridays at Confessions of a Fabric Addict

·       Peacock Party at Wendy’s Quilts and More

·       Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

·       Finished Or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

·       Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

·       UFO Busting at Tish in Wonderland