Quilting Travelogue - Part 2: Long Arm Quilting and a Gift

I my last post I talked about the piecing, cross stitching and shop hopping I did on our recent visit to my MIL in North Carolina.  In this post, I'll cover the quilt stitching I did and who benefitted from it!

(Long Arm) Quilting

One of the big plans for this trip to was to try to get a lot of quilts quilted.  On the one hand, it was a mixed bag on that.  I had brought one that had already been partially quilted on my Juki and I wanted to finish it to show my MIL how that machine stitches as a mid-arm DSM.

That folded bit of Kente is the layered quilt as I stacked up what I was going to bring.

This is one of the potential gifts for my community garden's Steering Committee members.  I'm not sure why I didn't finish quilting this when I worked on it last year --- I think I got "into my head" on the stitching and then put it aside.  

I was encouraged to get back to it after seeing the same stitch pattern I used demonstrated in one of the sessions I watched during the Free Motion Quilting Summit in August.  I realized that whatever had bugged me was now moot.  Unfortunately, this is another thing that we were too busy with other things for me to get to.  My plans are to try to finish this one up before the year ends.

I will say that I DID make a lot of progress on longarming!  I really learned a lot on this trip and most of that education came as we went about solving problems!  As a result, I think I now fully understand (and remember!) the steps to load a quilt on to the frame.  

The store that my MIL purchased her longarm from was on the Shop Hop and we stopped there so she could buy some "leader grips". 

You can see a demo of how they work in this video.

They really do help make loading faster as opposed to pinning your backing and top to the frame leaders.  The woman in the store advised getting a two-leader set but after trying them out we realized that a three leader set would have been better. 

I also confirmed what I needed to do to set up a stitch pattern.  It's important to keep whatever pattern I choose (and re-size) within the longarm's "frame space"  which is approximately equivalent to the depth of the throat space.  I also took pictures of all the pattern screens so I can plan before I arrive how I want to set up a quilt to be quilted.

This is just some of the installed designs.

The best news is that a long over due UFO got not only quilted but gifted!  My MIL has a good friend and former co-worker who has retired from New York to North Carolina and now lives in my MIL's town.  I had taught them both to quilt when both were still in NY.  The friend and her sister who was visiting her also came with us on the Shop Hop, a first for both!  

I had shown her a picture of this quilt top when we were both in NC back in May for my MIL's sister's funeral:

When she mentioned that she really, really liked it, I decided right then to gift it to her as a surprise housewarming gift.  This is the "Elvira" top I had made during Gudrun Erla's first Quarantine Quilt Along back in 2020.  Thanks to all the good lessons I learned this trip, I was able to successfully quilt this one on the longarm without too many problems. 

I'll do a full finish report on it tomorrow since there were a few more lessons learned both during and after it was quilted.  Like the fact that I didn't learn until after it was finished that I actually loaded it onto the frame wrong!  Although this is the shot of it fresh off the longarm, before we left it was also trimmed, bound and gifted.  

In my previous post, I noted that I had done some additional piecing and that was for another gift -- this time to christen the friend's new craft room in her new home.

This is a "Sewing Fairy" made from the pattern by Deborah Fisher of Fish Museum and Circus.  I learned about Deborah's designs when she was one of the presenters at July's Quilt Summer Camp.  Her session at Camp was on decorative "fussy cut" binding.  She has designed fabric lines for Windham Fabrics that are printed to facilitate the technique.  I purchased some of it from her after the Camp which is when I also saw her "Fairy" pattern.  Knowing that I planned to make a quilt housewarming gift, I figured a "Fairy" stuffed with little quilty notions would be a cool "new craft studio" gift as well!

 After "Elvira", we loaded my MIL's "Monochromatic Quilt" that was a guild challenge project and also finished that one.  

I did bring a second quilt for longarming.  Now that I know a little more about how to set up the patterns for stitching out, I also understand better how to position them on the quilt top.  I picked out the designs I wanted to use for that quilt and figured out where I wanted to position them on the top.  However, understanding that I needed to do that within the limits of the longarm's throat space, it meant I would need to stitch out the patterns in sections.  That was too big a task to try to tackle in the last day we were there.  So, yet another project is now packed away for the next trip down.  Whew!  Those two weeks went so quick when you have so much to do!