Fall Free Motion Finish

I finished all the free motion quilting on my little fall wall quilt yesterday. I McTavished, or tried to McTavish the background. And it came out ok. But it still needs a little something.

I can't decide if I want to hyper-quilt in the feathers and the rest of the motifs or maybe try a little paint.

What it looked like before quilting the background, with the larger version

While I was thinking on paint versus thread, I decided to see what colors I had in which kinds of paint. I don't use the paints much, though I ought to play around with them more. I found them easily enough, tucked away safely in their plastic project box.

Washing my Paints

Yes, I had to wash my paints. Not clean up my paints, or even clean up the painting area. When I opened the box, I found two bottles had blown their tops!

Thankfully, the paint was contained within the box and didn't spread within the box the any of the brushes, sponges or paint sticks. In fact, the main offender wasn't actually paint but paint extender. It cleaned up pretty easily and I did see that I have enough colors and choices of paint to add some sparkle and color to this little wall quilt.

I have no idea how this happened. I do keep the paints in a backroom that gets less AC than the rest of the house, but it's not enough to cause them to swell with the heat.

I am still undecided about adding paint, but it does seem like a good piece for some play. Stay tuned and I'll show you what it looks like soon.

McTavishing

I really love the look of McTavishing, especially how Karen McTavish does her signature fill. I have her book on McTavishing, Mastering the Art of McTavishing, but somehow mine just doesn't have the swirly goodness that hers has. I know that it is in part due to the larger range of motion she has on a long arm. Since I'm quilting on my sewing machine, I just can't get the same long, sweeping curves that she can, at least not without repositioning my hands. But I know I can do better with more practice.

I have been toying with doing a series on McTavishing or maybe a quilt-along link party so we can work on the stitch together. What do you think? Anybody want to play along?

I'm linking this post up with Nina Marie's Off the Wall Friday and Leah Day's Free Motion Friday.

Free Motion Foot and Toe Follow Up

I had a lovely conversation with a Bernina representative at the Fredericksburg Quilt and Sew Expo about the free motion ruler work I've been doing and what Bernina owners can do if they want to try it.

The latest news (Dec. 2014)on using a ruler foot with Berninas is here: Tutorial for using Janome Ruler Foot on Berninas.

EDITED! (in 2013) It seems it may be the #75 adapter that is needed, not the #77, but I am awaiting confirmation from a few sources. If you ordered wrongly because of my advice I am so sorry. I am a Janome girl and was trying my best to figure it out.

Edit Update: (also in 2013) KaKnitter reports: "Great News, the #75 adaptor works with some modifications. The Free motion convertible set has a slant on it and the adaptor does not slip in all the way unless you metal file down a little bit of the #75 adaptor. My dear husband fined tune it perfectly. I am thrilled. :)"  So dear readers, it seems that there is a way to make this foot work on the Berninas.  Note: I now recommend the method in the first link above before this method.

I showed her my ruler toe for the Janome Convertible Free Motion Foot Set and she agreed that it looked to be a well designed foot for what I was doing. She also offered to try out one of my rulers with other Bernina feet to see how they worked with the rulers. But I didn't exactly have a ruler to spare.

She suggested that Bernina owners might want to try the Embroidery Foot #26 as it has a little rim around the closed toe, however, she was concerned that since the foot had a small opening for the needle, that there might be opportunity for the foot to be pushed by the ruler enough to break the needle on the foot.

She thought that using the shank adapter for Bernina machines so that the Janome foot could be used would be the safest choice. They did not have an adapter foot at the show, so we couldn't see how well the Janome foot would work on it. There are two shank adapter feet for Bernina machines; the #75 and the #77.

After perusing the extensive list of feet and accessories at the Bernina site, I am thoroughly and completely overwhelmed! Wow! There's quite a selection. As far as I can tell, the #77 (short) shank adapter will allow you to attach other manufacturer's low shank feet. The #75 seems to be for certain Bernina accessories.

Some of my first attepts at ruler work in 2011

So I am hoping we have a Bernina owner who will try the #77 #75 adapter in combination with the Janome Convertible Free Motion Quilting Foot Set for Low Shank Models and the ruler toe and give us an opinion.

Bernina owners can certainly use their regular free motion feet for ruler work like many others, especially when first starting with ruler work. But please, try raising the foot a bit to decrease the chance of the ruler slipping under the needle.

I also talked to a Husqvarna-Viking dealer and got thoroughly confused. According to her, it all depended which model you had whether other manufactures' feet would work on these machines. Sounds like they've got some unique features that sense fabric thickness among other things that could cause problems, but there are other options too for FMQ.

It looks as if these two manufacturers might be the hardest to fit with a good FMQ specifically for ruler work. See the post: Foot Questions for Free Motion Ruler Work for more general info on feet for this technique, especially on other brands. Also I mentioned in a previous post that Patsy Thompson had modified a Juki foot for free motion ruler work.

I am looking forward to hearing from other quilters about these feet and their experiences with them on their machines. If you've got some insight to these machines, I'd love to hear it!

Blind Leading the Blind (Tales of Tech Meets Quilt Blogger)

A few thoughts on blogging

My friend LeeAnna wrote a brief post about being overwhelmed with all the techie stuff in building a blog and it made me do some thinking. It also reminded me of a techie tip I had read and wanted to try. I thought I had it figured out, but not all blogs cooperate with this trick. So I thought I'd write a few things about blogging today and see if I can help somebody or if we will all fall into the proverbial ditch.

Blogging 

Do not fear blogging! Blogging can be very simple. Building a blog that has a big following is much, much harder. If all you want is to write or post photos, Blogger is very easy to use. WordPress has a bit of a learning curve, so I am told, but it is pretty user friendly too. I have only blogged with Blogger, so I speak to only that platform. You cannot monetize your blog on the free WordPress platform, but you can monetize to some extent on Blogger.

Word Verification

If you want to build relationships and get comments, make it easy to leave them. Ditch the word verification! I eliminated word verification shortly after this blog was started and have never had problems with 'robots'  leaving comments. I did briefly switch to allowing anonymous comments and did see some spammers from that so I switched back.

 The fixes to this  is found in the 'Settings' (with the wrench) on the left hand side of your Blogger Dashboard, in the subheading 'Posts and Comments'.

No-Reply

If you ask a question of a blogger in their comments, make sure you are not a "No Reply" blogger! If 'no-reply' is active in your account, I cannot reply to your comment unless I have your email from some other source. So I must answer your question in the comments and hope that you return to read them.

This link is a good tute for changing your settings so you are not a no-reply blogger.

If you are trying to build your readership, leave comments under the "openID" or "name/url" profile instead of your google/blogger profile so anyone who clicks on your comment comes directly to your blog instead of to your Blogger or Google profile.

Content Theft

Another thing I have recently come accross is content scrapers or thieves. Make sure you have a copyright notice in place on your blog. This may not stop true theives, but it's a start. Recently I googled my own blog to see who had been linking to it, so I can visit and say "Hi" and to comment. But I also found two instances where another unrelated site was using my content on their spammy site. I'm crafting my copyright notice now.

Monetizing

You may have noticed that I do have some ads and affiliate links in a few places on my blog and I also have a disclaimer stating that there are affiliate links on my blog. Putting a lot of effort into a blog is time consuming and I'd like a little money back from my efforts plus we are still digging ourselves out of a cancer induced financial hole. There may be more ads in the future, maybe my own ebook or a few patterns, but I have no desire for the main focus to be commercial.

If you like what you see and read on the blog, I would be most appreciative of a thumbs up, share, like, 1+ or what ever social networking doo-hicky you use. As I said before, I am still learning this stuff and I am glad to share what I know, but you are probably better off doing a search for the topics you are interested in since I can't do these tech topics much justice, plus they take a long time to write. I'd rather quilt!

Back to the Regularly Scheduled Program

From this:

Linda Taylor's work.

To what I call 'regular day-to-day life' with kids and quilting. Sigh....

I had a real nice break at the Quilt and Sew Expo. But as an introvert it wasn't all relaxing and fun. Lots of people! I was there to demonstrate the Gammill Charm, a sit-down long arm. Thankfully, when it comes to talking to people about something I'm passionate about, like free motion quilting, I have a much easier time talking.

Here's Lori, the owner of Threads Run Through It, setting up the Statler Stitcher. We have plans for me to teach free motion quilting classes at her shop, starting in November. I also met Dave Stafford, CEO of Gammill.

Here's the Charm with the side leaf up and my sampler of quilting I stitched on the first day. I would stitch and after a minute or two, feel the presence of someone looking over my shoulder, and then let them stitch. Sometimes it took some persuading! Several times I had someone who hadn't free motioned before sit down to stitch and I was amazed at how well every one did. Most used the purple grip thing (what is that thing called?) instead of fooling with gloves.


Linda Taylor, pioneer of long arm quilting and professional quilter for 20 years, was teaching classes at the show and since she's a Gammill Girl, one of her pieces was hung in the booth. Right above me! It's a very abstract but fun piece! It is nearly coated with crystals, front and back.

I sure looks like a lot of fun! Well, maybe not the attaching crystals part. So many different stitches and designs. I wish I had a chance to meet her.

"Clouds in My Latte" by Karen Marchetti  was hanging on the other side of the booth. Linda's quilt will stop you in your tracks, but Karen's really draws you in with its subtle colors and gorgeous, well-planned, uniform quilting.

"Clouds in my Latte" by Karen Marchetti

"Come closer", says the quilt.

"Clouds in my Latte" by Karen Marchetti

I could have taken more pictures of the quilts on exhibit, but since there's the statement of "personal use only" I didn't take them for putting on the blog. So I tried getting some people pics. I got a shot of long arm quilter extraordinaire, Lisa Sipes, but it came out really blurry. Maybe it's because she's always on the move!

I did some ruler work on the Charm too. Many people thought it very interesting. I agree! I talked to a few sewing machine folks about the ruler toe, most notably: Janome, Bernina and Husqvarna-Viking.

The Janome rep. loved the idea and told me later that day that he sold the ruler toe he had there to some one who had talked to me. I think it was a gal who had said she had seen a video on ruler work on Youtube. We decided it was probably my video. That was cool! She was very good at free motion, BTW.

I was disappointed to miss one of my classes. I thought it started later in the day, and arrived after it was over. Dusty Farrell, the teacher, was nice enough to talk to me for a while and gave me some advice and also gave me his 'coupon' for a discount at his booth. The coupon was a little black skeleton shape! His line of rulers include a few bone and skull shaped ones to match his tattoos! He had a video and ruler set for doing ruler work on a long arm, but I didn't have the budget for it, even with a discount. Sad day. But I did purchase a long-desired string line with stencil chalk for marking longer lines on quilts.

I'll save the rest of the info for another post.

I hope you've had an enjoyable weekend! I'm linking this post with Freemotion by the River's Tuesday Link party.

BTW, the sale special is good on the Charm and the Gammill long arms through this Wednesday, should anyone from the show read this. Mention me if you place an order.