When a straight line is the answer

This is the first of what I intend to be a series on straight lines. Early on in my quilting career, I vehemently avoided straight lines at all costs because they were difficult, but one day I realized that if I never did them, I'd never be proficient at them and I'd be limiting my design choices.

Fortunately, the eye sees what it wants to see, rendering my crooked lines straight. They don't have to be good! They're still a pain, they take a lot of time to do, but sometimes they're just what a quilt cries out for. 



This quilt, Sara's 1940's sampler, is a fine example. I love double- or triple-line channel quilting as a background design. Originally a 19th-century design, it looks good on any quilt. 



Look how great it is going in different directions and note the wonderful contrast with the feathers. 

Thread tension

I am back from my long absence from this blog, inspired to talk about thread tension and another kind of tension: specifically, deadlines.

I ran out of clear thread, which I use sometimes for ditch quilting, and I decided to try Superior Thread's MonoPoly. As is the case any time I change the equation on my longarm, I had adjustments to make. But this time was ridiculous.

It all worked out in the end. I appealed to Superior for help, because I've been quilting professionally for more than 10 years, and I thought I had tension figured out. There is always something new to learn, and in this case it was that I needed a larger needle and almost no tension at all.  And I put Superior's Bottom Line thread in the bobbin. A stronger thread can snap the top thread.

Now I adjust the tension all the time, the top and the bobbin tension. You change brands, thicknesses, color, etc., you have to adjust the tension. Thinking you can machine quilt without these adjustments is unrealistic. Your machine vendor and/or repair people undoubtedly have warned you never to go near that bobbin tension screw, but it has to be done or you'll drive yourself crazy and you'll hate machine quilting. (Suggested reading: pages 50-53 in Diane Gaudynski's Guide to Machine Quilting, AQS 2002)

Then I quilted with metallic thread. Hadn't done that in a while, which sent me digging through files for the long e-mails from the friendly people at Sulky whom I asked for help years ago. Put in a new and bigger needle and loosened the tension. A lot. Skipped some of the tension guides. Quilted more slowly.

I used a silver and gray metallic, a twist, to do threadplay over black Fairy Frost fabric. It looks sensational. I forgot to take a picture, so look for that down the road. And I did more threadplay on a handbag I'm making. Fun.

Then I called Superior again because I needed a really light gold with shine, but not a metallic. They sent me a spool of Kimono Silk, my new love. That was so much fun! Again, put in a big needle and loosen the tension. (Some lessons have to be learned over and over and over ...) It's like spun sugar. Yummy.

I won't be using silk for everything; it's expensive. But I like it, and other thin threads, like Superior So Fine, for quilting veins and creases on leaf and flower applique, for threadplay, and for dense background quilting so it doesn't over-stiffen the quilt.

My own tension levels can throw my machine's performance off, which brings me to the dire deadline situation. Early in the year, I had a tiny waiting list, typical for January. Then the calls began coming, and by spring, well, swamped doesn't even begin to describe ... By June, I was afraid I wouldn't finish quilting all the quilts in time for a show. I did indeed meet that deadline, and now I'm on deadline for other shows.

I have learned a lot this year:
1. I need to say no more often.
2. Each day really does have enough time for a dip in Lake Me.
3. I can get on my own list.
4. Life is too short to squander time in ways that don't bring me joy.
5. I must loosen my tension.

My vehement advice for anyone who takes their tops to a machine quilter: Get on the waiting list 3 months before you need it. Don't wait till the top is done. Really. Quiltmaking is a marathon, not a sprint, and another quilt show is always just around the corner.

And, good custom quilting is worth the wait.

The Dallas show

Tea and baskets

When last we left the Dallas show results, the Bunnies Running Amok were into farmer Brown's crops. Sally had two other award-winning quilts in the show, Join Me for Tea and Baskets in Flight.

In the tea quilt, I relied quite a bit on continuous curve quilting in the piecing for simplicity and to keep the focus on the blocks. Behind the embroidery, I tried to set the scene. In one example, I created the impression of a beadboard wall with double straight lines and a zigzag meander surface to hold the jar and infuser. Cute. In the frame around the blocks, I did a flower and leaf meander.

Swirls add femininity and dimension to the teapot and hanky block. I ditch quilted between the block and its frame and edgestitched around all embroidery lines. I'm convinced this is the best approach. I've seen blocks like these either indiscriminately crosshatched or else the background is densely quilted and the embroidery left untouched, which makes it sag -- and sad. This quilt won honorable mention.

Sally's basket quilt is another example of her fine handwork. This quilt was time-consuming and required a lot of attention to detail.

I used clear thread on top and white in the bobbin to get the details outlined inside the baskets and to achieve a wholecloth effect on the back.

Graceful S echoes form backdrops for the baskets. In a quilt like this in which white fabric meets more white fabric, a key decision is whether to treat it all as background or as blocks, sashing and borders. We opted for separate elements, so to play up the sashing, I ditch quilted between sashing and blocks and quilted rows of straight lines with tiny dimensional quilting in the centers.

I freehanded flowers, feathers, butterflies and echoing in the ample borders. I quilted circles on the green swag and tiny dimensional quilting between the swag and the pink embroidered flowers.

There is no one way to quilt a quilt -- there are many. If I had to do this one over again, I might do it quite differently. This quilt is much like a wholecloth in effect, so trapunto would have been a great choice, but washing the quilt wasn't an option.

This quilt won third place and a judge's choice ribbon.

The Dallas quilt show

The bunny quilt

The Dallas quilt show was full of surprises and wonderful work, as usual. Three of my clients entered six quilts, three of which won four ribbons.

Let's start with Sally Brown's bunny quilt, which won a ribbon. It's becoming famous, people love it, and I get requests to ``make my quilt special like you did the bunny quilt.'' Here's how it got to be that way:


First, Sally's impeccable workmanship --applique, piecing, pressing, cutting and on and on. The pattern came from a book, but she added unique touches of her own, such as the border. She says the border piecing was so not easy to do, but it appears effortless to me. Her marching orders for me were ``do your thing.'' Had I done that, it would have turned out differently.


My instinct was to balance the sweet, feminine aspects with straight lines. Contrast is the name of the game in quilting -- or you end up with boring sameness. I chose channel quilting -- the straight single and double diagonal lines in the piecing and backgrounds. We agreed on feathers in the border. Around the feathers, the white spaces on either side struck me as two different elements, so I quilted a ribbon candy design (from Linda Taylor's Fancy That book) on the inside and a straight-line meander on the perimeter. The curls in the sashing are a great foil for the straight lines. Of course, I outlined and detailed the applique and ditch-quilted between the blocks and sashing.

The undecided part was what to do in the remaining light sides of the log cabin blocks, where the quilting would really show up. I set off in search of a triangular motif that would look great turned in any direction. At last, I found a sophisticated, abstract design I thought would be perfect. But Sally wanted something whimsical. The only other idea I had was to put in rabbits in a garden, an idea she loved.


Which leads me to a book recommendation, well, two: 250 Continuous-Line Quilting Designs for Hand, Machine & Long-Arm Quilters, and 250 More Continuous-Line Quilting Designs by Laura Lee Fritz, C&T Publishing. These are wonderful resources for flora, fauna and many other representational designs. Her instructions on how to set a scene and tell a story are indispensable, especially for those of use who didn't attend art school.


With a King Tut variegated (Superior Thread) in shades of beige and cream, I lasered in the rascally rabbits, carrots, tomatoes, berries. peas and an artichoke. Everyone thinks it's cabbage, but Laura Lee labeled it an artichoke. Who knew vegetables were good for quilting, not just for eating. Finally, I did another little straight-line meander in the background. I like how it adds continuity with the border.

Part of the allure of the quilting is the batting choice: Hobbs wool, which is lofty, so it creates a trapunto effect and the quilted bunnies and veggies puff out. Well worth it.

More on Sally's stuff and the show to come ...

Quilt of the Week #3

Bound for Dallas

I just love going to quilt shows, drawing inspiration, refilling the creative well, seeing what other creative people have whipped up, buying more thread. Yes, I know fabric is the addictive substance of choice for most people, but some of us are different. So with the Dallas quilt show just days away, here is a preview of what one of my customers has entered in the show. I'm not sure how much of my work will be in the show; that's always a surprise for me.

This quilt is big, too big for the details I feel like sharing to fit all in one photo, so to see the whole thing you'll have to head to Market Hall. My client, David, likes Civil War-era quilts and his usual color palette includes blue and brown. This one is a star medallion featuring an American eagle fabric, which provided the design inspiration for the quilting.

This top has myriad white spaces in which I had planned to quilt all manner of patriotic motifs, but getting them to fit proved difficult. I narrowed them down to various eagles, starbursts, laurel leaves, trumpets, a liberty bell and straight lines -- all proclaiming freedom. Each eagle, modified versions of a Linda Taylor design and one in the book Civil War Women by Barbara Brackman, C&T Publishing, had to be simplified and sometimes redesigned to fit a particular shape around the center star and outside the blue log cabin path surrounding the star. (I have a knack for trying to do something simple but ending up a complex endeavor.) I got the trumpet from a Dover copyright-free book and I drew the bell from photos found on the Internet. I freehanded the laurel leaves.

I opted for background quilting to make the motifs pop like sculpture: radiating lines, tiny arcs and a little stippling here and there. And I added rows of straight lines where dense quilting wasn't needed.

Is anyone else out there a technosaur like me? I can handle hard-to-quilt projects, I can design, I can freehand, I can spell, I can conjugate many verbs, but I can't seem to get the hang of posting photos on this blog. I have more photos to show, but I've run out of computer savvy for the moment. There may be more later. Fingers crossed. See you at the show!

Jean's starburst

Jean's quilts are so fun to work on for many reasons: choice of colors and fabrics, she lets me have free rein (within reason), her foundation piecing is really good, and they're contemporary -- eliciting a whole different and challenging approach to the quilting than do traditional quilts.

I sat with this top for awhile and considered possibilities. Nothing slid into place in my brain for some time until I noticed the piecing lines connecting the outer spikes to the medallion. Those lines create a circle. That reminded me of something I'd saved in my great big inspiration notebook, a collection of magazine tearsheets, advertising, photos and designs from various sources.

I like mandalas and their inherent movement of pattern in several different directions. Now, Jean's top already moved, so the concept of a star bursting from the center outward on a spinning circle really made me happy.


With ample color in the fabrics, the use of warm thread colors would have been overkill. I wanted contrast to make the quilting show up, but only low contrast, so I opted for the light blue found in the tone-on-tone background fabric. I used a really thin thread, and if I had to do it all over again, I might opt for a heavy thread in some places.

I knew I wanted radiating lines somewhere. They're so powerful. These seemed to fit best outside the circle, as the spikes already point that way. I like the way they cross at the corners. Why didn't I just run those lines off the 2 borders? It didn't occur to me at the time, but that would have been a sensible option.


Now what to do inside the circle. This is the kind of thing I think about as I drift off to sleep. Having searched fruitlessly for a motif, I decided to design one. I really liked the orange swoop shape, so I played with that, freehanding something similar. This is where doubt likes to creep in: Is this anything? Is this anything good? Is this going to look stupid? Dare I take a chance? Fortune favors the brave, and besides, I didn't have any better ideas. And I'm willing to rip out stitches if need be. So, I decided to repeat the swoop as many times as would fit, have them point the other way for movement and be about the same size as the orange original. That left me with just the space above the orange swoop, which I filled with flowing, horizontal lines of echo. I stood back to admire and ... hated it.


The swoops didn't show up. Might dimensional quilting be the answer? Threadplay came to mind. Yes. The thin thread -- So Fine! #50/3 by Superior -- is appropriate for threadplay, so off I went laying in color, overlapping little circles like spun sugar in the background, because there are circles all over the background fabric. I filled a few other spaces with some designs by Linda Taylor, whose pattern books are an essential part of my bag of tricks. And when I was done, I liked it at last. And Jean liked it, so it was worth it in the end.

Book recommendation

   

I've had the privilege of learning from many gifted teachers, one of whom is Hari Walner. This is her latest book from C&T Publishing, $26.95. I've been waiting for it for years. She has given us new designs, reworked designs from her successful line of pattern packs and great color photos of each motif quilted in various threads with diverse background quilting so you can see just what it will look like and not have to imagine. Some people can visualize really easily and others can't, so this is a real help. 

The chapter Design Your Quilt for Quilting is my favorite. Like Harriet Hargrave suggests, Hari tells us to think about the quilting from the beginning, before starting to make a top, so that finding appropriate quilting designs won't be a chore.

Among her suggestions is eliminating seams when possible, and I could not agree more. So often, I've quilted a beautiful motif that is perfect for the theme and space only to find that a seam or an intersection of seams literally sticks out in the center of the motif. That's not good design. Super-easy speed piecing methods add seams so beginners don't have to fool with set-in squares and triangles or deal with bias edges, but they create problems for me when I'm quilting. Hari shows how to redraft the block and how much more successful the quilt is in the end. This makes a big difference in show quilts. 

Another suggestion is to vary the way borders are applied so those seams don't interfere with a border design. Quilting being a visual thing, you need to see that page to really understand the concept.

If you are trying your hand at machine quilting, this book is a must-have. If you're not interested in machine quilting, it's still worth acquiring because your quilts need to be quilted (or they're not quilts) and the book includes gorgeous designs anyone would want on their quilts.

Other titles from Hari:

Trapunto by Machine

Exploring Machine Trapunto

Paper pattern packs of continuous line machine quilting patterns published by Beautiful Publications

Quilt of the Week #1

Suzanne's Celtic Knot

This is a 30X33 wallhanging I quilted for my client Suzanne. I don't do Celtic anything -- as  a freehander, parallel lines are too big of a challenge. Parallel lines need to be, well, parallel, a level of perfection freehanding doesn't achieve. But I knew I'd be using matching thread, it's small, and most important, this quilt cried out for complimentary Celtic designs. The background is too big to quilt just any old design on it and call it a day. I started to add round motifs in the corners, but they looked off center. So instead I tried to use a triangular design whose point would intersect the knot, but that didn't work either because the white space is a rectangle and the center motif is circular. So I found a simple border pattern and thought it would be easy to make it into a circle. Make that an oval -- the space is larger on two sides. After 4 tries, I finally got a design I liked.

This is the back of the quilt, which shows off all the quilting:

The whole effort was a mix of algebra and geometry, and math has alway been my Achilles' heel. I got a trapunto effect (extra stuffing that makes with the motif 3-dimensional) by using Hobbs wool batting. I marked the design with blue Wash-B-Gone. I quilted the chain, stippling inside as I quilted it. Intuition said echo it several times -- always listen to your gut -- then added dimensional crescent quilting on either side of the chain, a tiny crescent meander in the corners, small echoes between the chain and the knot, stippling inside the knot, and a tiny swirl at the very center. I put in large crescents in the braided border to make the pieced points lie flat and that resulted in beautiful texture. Finally, I quilted swirls in the outer border, following the pattern of the printed fabric.


It was so much work, and it took hours and hours, but it was worth it. Custom work is always worth it.