New Quilts

I've been working on some volunteer quilts.  I have four to show you today.
The first two quilts are for MQS (Machine Quilters Showcase).  At their show they have a room set up where people can go piece quilts and longarm the quilts.  Once the show is over they have more quilts left that need to be longarmed and my longarm quilt guild does these as a service project throughout the year.  I took two home to work on at our June meeting and turned them in this past Saturday when I was there for our August meeting.

A strip quilt for MQS that I longarm quilted.

A close up of the quilt pattern I used and the geisha inspired fabric that was in the quilt that I found interesting.

The second MQS quilt on the frame ready to be quilted.

The finished MQS quilt.

A close up of the quilt pattern I used on this quilt.

The next two quilts are my Quilts of Valor (QOV) quilts I volunteer to longarm quilt for the foundation.  I also picked them up when I picked up my MQS quilts in June in Wichita.  I returned them this past Saturday to Wichita and dropped them off in exchange for two new quilts to longarm.  With K-State football starting in two weeks I will be lucky as my contact for QOV has season tickets to football and basketball games so she will be coming this direction and we can exchange quilts when she's here for game day!

This was a beautifully put together QOV quilt I longarm quilted.

A close up of the quilting on it. 

The second QOV quilt I longarm quilted.  On this quilt I did all custom work instead of using a pantograph like I normally do for my volunteer quilts.  

A close up of one of the custom blocks.  You can't see them but the cornerstones are small white hearts on navy fabric so I put a heart in each cornerstone of the quilt.

Speeding Up My Quilting Process

Today's post is a more technical post.  Part of doing quilting for Quilts of Valor (QOV) is trying to be quick on the turn around time.  Not my strong suit this past month with school wrapping up.  But with summer here I have a little bit more time to quilt.  I've found an easier way to get my QOV quilts done in less time and it has nothing to do with becoming faster on the quilting end (although that never hurts).

The Quilt of Valor I was working on when I took these pictures.  Isn't she beautiful?

Instead of using paper pantographs, which are long rolls of paper with the quilting pattern drawn on them, I use Pantovision. Pantovision is a program designed by ABM Innova.  I happen to love it because it makes the old fashioned roll paper patterns obsolete and digitizes everything instead of me trying to find a place to store the paper rolls.  Let's just say, I wasn't blessed in the organizational area of life, I'm treading water at best.  I'm a fan of anything that takes paper clutter out of my life.
To make my QOV quilting go smoother I've found a way that works for me.  What I've done is I have taken my most popular QOV patterns and saved them as QOVStars, QOVvines, etc so I I know that these are the patterns that I've used on previous QOV.  It is also helpful because most QOV quilts are about the same size usually within a few inches.  Then to make the process easier I've taken and resized all my patterns so I can easily get a set number of passes (usually 4) before I have to roll my quilt.  Knowing that I've done this I do not have to worry about checking before I start quilting if I have enough room on my final pass before rolling.  I know I'm good to go because I've set this pattern up so it fits without needing to check to make sure I'm not going to run out of room.  Nothing stinks worse than starting a pass of a pattern and then bumping into the back of your longarm and trying to pull it down to finish the pattern. It is also nice because I used to spend a lot of time moving my pattern on the screen up and down after I rolled it each time trying to figure out where I was again.
I haven't downloaded the latest Pantovision update so this is my "old fashioned" way of advancing my quilt. I load each quilt and quilt my first four rows.  My first row of the 4 rows is usually a partial row where I am only quilting in the parts that are on the quilt and the pattern is actually hanging off the top of the quilt on the batting.
Each time I start a new row I mark where I start on the batting with a dot.  After I complete the row I come back and line the sew head up with the dot.

 Then I check my screen to see how far off I am. Here I am only about a 1/2" off to the left.

 To fix it I scoot the pattern over with the arrow keys  to line it up. (I'm off just a tad to the north in the picture because I'm trying to do too many things with too little hands.)

 Once I'm lined up on the screen I go down to the next row and put my needle down in my starting place on the quilt.  I always start off the quilt on the batting and then sew my way onto the quilt.  I also mark with Sharpie.  It doesn't bleed through the batting and it will be cut away after I finish quilting.  Then I put my needle down back in the black dot and start sewing.  When I'm through I'll come back to my dot, adjust as necessary like before and go across again.

 Here you can see all 5 dots.  The dot at the very top is from the previous 4 rows that I did before I rolled the quilt top.  It is how I know far to roll my quilt which I explain in the bottom photo.  The next four dots are the four passes I made this time/roll. As long as I line up with the previous dot before I move down I'm good to go.  

 Below is a picture of me lining up the fourth row from the previous quilting before I rolled it to the top. It then becomes a measuring point which you can see on the sewing area but doesn't affect my quilting. What I do is after I finish my 4 passes I roll my quilt to the very top of the frame.  I stop when I have my sewing head pushed as far up to the quilt take up bar as possible and the black dot from the 4th row is now nestled inside the sewing head hole.  If you look closely in the picture you can see the dot and the take up bar where the quilt is rolled onto in the picture.  Since I'm lined up on that dot I can now move down and start quilting immediately without having to make any adjustments on my Pantovision screen.

Hopefully this gives you some new things to think about when you are quilting.  I've found it very helpful to have resized my patterns to fit a certain number of passes on my quilting area.  The time I save is definitely the time it took me to figure out how to resize my patterns to get 4 passes in each time before I rolled it to the next.
What have you done to make longarming easier for you?

Quilts, Quilts and Barn Quilts!

I've been busy finishing up the end of the school year as a kindergarten teacher.  It seems like the last days are the busiest.  I've been able to get a few quilts done as well.
This first quilt you have seen before.  It's the quilt I taught how to make in my Beginner's Quilting class I taught for UFM.  It's a simple log cabin design.  (If you'd like to learn I'm offering this class twice this summer through UFM.)  One of my participants had never made a quilt before and I think she did a great job.  I did the quilting for her.

The finished quilt.

A close up of one of the log cabin blocks.

The back, since now that I'm a quilter I like to check out the back as much as the front.

 My next quilt I did for a fellow Deacon at church.  I love this pattern and color choice.  I am a bright person so the colors spoke to me.  Originally we had agreed on a loopy pattern but after I did the double bubbles on the K-State quilt I knew this quilt needed the same pattern of quilting.

The finished quilt.

One of the blocks.

A close up of the back.

A closer look at the quilting on the front.  So I like looking at the front quilting, too!

The last quilt is another Quilt of Valor (QOV) quilt I did.  The neat thing I liked about this quilt is I am finally getting quicker in my quilting so I can finish one of these in an evening after work instead of dragging out over several evenings or a Saturday.  I loved the pattern on this quilt and I felt like I had just the perfect color of thread for quilting it.

The block with my standard stars & loops that I use for a lot of my QOV quilts.

The finished quilt.

Lastly, here are some pictures from our visit to Dustan's family a few weekends ago.  They live in Wichita county, Kansas, which is not the county Wichita, KS is located.  Instead Wichita county is way out west about 40 miles from the Kansas-Colorado border.  Wichita county is having a quilt barn initiative.  The local eco-development is trying to get folks to put up a barn quilt on the local barns.  My in-laws have joined in and I think their barn turned out quite exquisite!  Everyone had an opinion on which quilt block should be used.  I picked my top three and I know this was one of my top three so I was happy.

The barn.

A closer look at the quilt block on the barn.

 Our dogs travel with us quite a bit.  Happy our Golden Retriever went along with us.  He was in love with the water sprinkler my mother-in-law had going in the yard.  He really liked it but I thought this picture was the funniest of them all since it looks like he is scared and running away for his life!

It's coming to get me!

A Little of This & That

I've been keeping busy here at the hacienda.  I finished up my time at MQS (Machine Quilter's Showcase) by volunteering Saturday to help take down quilts.  It was a very intense process.  Volunteers were assigned to teams to work to take down quilts. My job, since I was young and tall was to get on the ladder and take the top post off the top rails to take the quilt off.

While waiting for our crew to catch up I had the lady assisting me take this photo of me pretending to take down the quilt.  I don't have gloves on because I wasn't actually allowed to touch the quilts just the poles.  Funny thing was right before this picture was taken I about tipped off the ladder.  I'm sure that's covered under the show's insurance, crazy blogger girl staging a photo accident!

After all the quilts were down I picked up my quilt and headed home.  While I was waiting for time to take down quilts I stopped by and visited the Quilts of Valor (QOV) booth and dropped off a quilt I had finished for them and picked up a couple more to quilt.  I found out while I was there that they had awarded one of the quilts I had quilted at the MQS show to a woman who was a Marine during the Vietnam War.

This is the quilt that was awarded at MQS.  I loved the colors and designs on this one.

My first quilt after MQS was another QOV quilt.  (Seriously, knew that quilting would have as many acronyms as teaching!?!)  It was a beauty made with batiks.  It was my first time quilting batiks and I'm happy to report that everything went fine.

The finished quilt.

Up close of the quilting on the latest QOV.  I used a leaf pattern to accentuate all the leaf designs in the fabric.

I then got this beautiful baby quilt finished.  I love the colors on it!

I just love the colors she picked for this quilt she made for her baby.  

Next up was a customer quilt. It's a large flannel quilt.  I appreciate the opportunity to be trusted with others quilts and I really enjoyed working on this one.  I loved the colors and block arrangements which gave me ideas for some quilts I have in the works myself.

The flannel quilt on the frame ready to go.

Close up of the quilting on the back.

Close up of the quilting on the front border.  I used variegated thread.

Then last Monday I went to my local quilt guild meeting.  I had a blast!  I showed my competition quilt at show & tell time.  Our speaker, Deanna Hodson, was outstanding.  I was so enthralled I forgot to take any pictures until she held up her last quilt.  Her program was called Everything Old is New Again.  Many of her quilts are made out of old lady hankies, table cloths and lace doilies.  She does amazing things with them and her quilts are just amazing.  It doesn't hurt that she uses a lot of pink and I happen to love pink. You can visit her website here: http://www.rosecottagequilts.com/

The photo of the last quilt Deanna showed us.  She was amazing!

Last week I also listened to an online quilt webinar with Angela Walters.  It was on the business of machine quilting.  It was a great webinar and she talked about not only working in your business but on your business. So many great take away tips and all for free!  If you haven't discovered this great resource I highly reccommend you vist the Handiquilters webinar page.  All the webinars are posted for your listening enjoyment and I've found that many of them are not brand specific to the type of machine you have.  A great resource: http://www.handiquilter.com/webinar/
I have several quilts waiting for me in my studio.  So I better get going!

Working Girl

I didn't have to teach today because we had parent-teacher conferences all week so today was our comp day for that.  I had decided I was going to treat it like a working girl day for my quilting business.  I worked on my competition quilt and finished piecing it this morning. I then went to our local quilt shop, All About Quilts, and purchased the backing for it. They have delightful and abundant extra wide backings for those large quilts you make.

After I finished up at the local quilt shop I went and visited the insurance man.  (See more in the next paragraph.)  After I got home I went to work on loading my latest Quilt of Valor (QOV) quilt onto the machine.  It definitely called for that pesky star pattern I've been working on mastering for what seems years now. OK just several months but it's definitely more challenging that I would have imagined when I started out. I worked all afternoon and a little bit this evening but I got it finished.

A star on the back.  I don't have a ton of thread in stock but today what I did have matched up perfectly!

This QOV had a nice embroidered Welcome Home block. I had to improve as I quilted around it.

A close up of the quilting on the front.

Today I took the plunge and took this little hobby from pleasure to business.  When I first bought my machine my insurance man, Brian, told me as long as I was using my machine for a hobby it was covered under our home owners insurance. But as soon as I started taking money for my quilting it would not be covered and if something happened to my machine I was going to be suffering a loss of a lot of cash.  Lots of tears.  So up to this point I'd only being doing my QOV quilts and quilts for friends, for experience not cash.  The past couple of weeks I've had several people contact me about quilting their quilts.  I didn't even know some of them.  So after thinking it over I decided I was ready.  I called Brian, sent him a few photos of my machine and paid him the money to insure my longarm machine for business purposes.
This evening I had my first customer come over and drop off her quilt.  She'd heard of me through a gal who took my quilting class (piecing) a few weeks ago.  It's a small baby quilt she made for her daughter.  On her way out she recognized our wedding picture of us riding our bicycle from our wedding.  She had worked as a manager at Varsity Donuts (I LOVE Varsity Donuts!!!) and had seen our picture from there.  Small world.
I learned several important things about working for myself today.  Yes it's nice to be your own boss and set your own hours. However, if you start working late (say 9AM) you end up working later (say 7PM).  So the lesson of the day was yes it's nice to set your own hours but the work still has to be finished either way.  Hummm...Lesson learned.
So my day of being an independent working girl went really well.  I got my work done.  I was able to do several different tasks and still accomplish them all.  I don't think I would have done it much differently.  I know things won't always be so smooth but it was nice to have a smooth start.  So if you have any quilts lying around that need to be quilted, I'm open for business!

One last photo of the QOV I worked on today.

Quilt of Valor Take Two

After my first go at quilting a Quilt of Valor quilt, I was a tad bit hesitant to go straight to the second one I had waiting for me in the closet.  So I took a break and thoroughly enjoyed quilting the brown heart quilt from eBay.  After recharging my batteries on the eBay quilt I was ready to tackle my second Quilt of Valor (QOV) quilt.  I carefully checked the backing for any flaws in the fabric and did find a small stain on the edge this time before I was halfway through quilting.  So I carefully loaded the quilt so the stain would not be on the finished portion of the quilt.

Locked, loaded and ready for quilting.

I then chose a pattern for this beauty.  I have a very fun loopy flower but the flowers on the fabric of this quilt were more pointy.  So I went into the pattern library of my Pantovision software and started looking around.  That's a place I had visited since I got my machine and decided those patterns were way to hard for me.  This time they didn't look nearly as daunting and I found a cute and simple pointy flower that I thought accented the flowers in the quilt print nicely.  I had never used this pattern before and normally I would try it out before I went to work. But I had already loaded the quilt and decided what the heck I was just going to go for it.  I started slowly and the pattern proved not to be too difficult.  Six weeks ago I would never have thought of just going for it without hours of practicing.  What a difference some quality time at the machine makes in workmanship and quality.

A picture of the quilting on the top side of the quilt.

Finishing this quilt didn't take too long. I finished it up Friday night because my good bicycling friend, Susan, was coming over to see my new set up.  So I wanted to get it off the frame and load some practice fabric so she could try out this new monster taking up a bedroom in our house.  I also was heading to Wichita the next morning for a meeting so it worked out nicely so I could deliver both of the QOV back to the coordinator who lives there.

A picture of the backside of the quilt when I was finished quilting.  

The lessons learned while working on this quilt were more of  confidence building type instead of the workmanship side of things. Since these flowers were more pointy I had to concentrate to make sure I stopped at each point before returning back down so I had a true point on the petals of the flowers.
I delivered both QOV Saturday morning and traded them in for a new QOV that I will quilt up here in the next few weeks.

Fear of Getting Started

So I finally finished up my first Quilts of Valor quilt today.  Quilts of Valor (QOV) is an organization that aims to give every American veteran a quilt to thank them for their service to our country.  You can find out more by visiting their website: www.qovf.org .

Locked & loaded, ready to get started.

I tack down the edges of the quilt using a large stitch to hold them in place. I sew very close to the edge of the material so the person who is finishing the quilt will not need to remove my basting stitches.

I coined a new term called "fear of getting started".  Some people suffer from the fear of being left out.  Google it, it's real.  I suffer from the more stifling fear of getting started.  I had this quilt on my frame locked and loaded for two days before I pulled the trigger and got started.  

There I go! 

Then once again I suffered from muscle tightness/fatigue.  This time instead of getting an adult beverage I tried some yoga posses-mostly warrior poses because what's a better yoga pose for a QOV than warrior? I used my leaf pattern and offset it as the pattern to accentuate the leaf shapes in the fabric of the material.

This is an up close picture of the quilting on the front side.  I really liked that navy blue bird fabric.  

Then about halfway through quilting I found a slight flaw in the fabric backing as I was rolling the quilt up to advance it on the frame.  Talk about deflating.  I contacted the local QOV representative and let her know what happened.  I then really didn't do much with the quilt and let it setting on the frame since Saturday night.
Finally, today we had a snow day.  There is 11" of snow sitting outside my house right now.  Tomorrow is a another snow day.  I finally went and finished the quilting for the QOV.  Then promptly loaded one of my eBay quilts and was off to the races again.  I'm over a 1/3 of the way done on a quilt the same size as my QOV one that took four days.  I'm really going to have to get over this fear of getting started thing.
Some things I learned this go around:

A look at the quilting from the back of the quilt.

1. Tension issues only pop up on other people's quilts.
2. Fixing tension issues requires you to think backwards.  If it's took tight on the top you need to tighten the top tension.  Seriously?  Seems counter intuitive but I finally caught on.
3. The flaws you see when you stop to check your quilting in the middle of quilting are much bigger than when the finished project is done and you go back to try to find them and they have seemingly disappeared.
4. I'm proud I was able to line up the seem on the backing fabric to match the middle of the quilt top.  That was more quilter's math than I was expecting.
When it's all said and done I can chalk it up to another learning experience and keep on keeping on.
By the way, with it going to be so cold the next few days make sure to throw another quilt or two on the bed.  And if you have one a pup to keep your toes warm.  Until next time.

The view from my quilting studio today.  That's 11" of the white stuff if you're wondering.