Advanced Loading Tips & Tricks for Longarm Frames - HQ Watch & Learn Quilting Show Episode 8

hi welcome to watch and learn with handy quilter today we're going to talk about loading your quilt we're going to give you some tips and tricks for preparing to load preparing your quilt top to load we're going to give you tips for loading your quilt and then we're going to end with tools that help in loading and managing your quilt while you're quilting i'm johnny barfist i'm a studio educator here at handy quilter with me i'm christina whitney a studio educator here also a handy quilter so we're excited to have you here all right christina what are we going to talk about we're going to talk about leaders first yes okay so first of all let's talk about what kinds of leaders we have available okay so here is our most commonly used leader it is our studio leader it's also part of our gallery set it is comes in different lengths depending on what size frame you have so you can buy whatever size length you want and you can also if you're really crazy cut them down to smaller lengths so you have more leaders and then you don't stretch out your big leaders by using small baby quilts on that same leader repeatedly right so what sizes do you use at home i use all sizes okay yeah i just have a whole bin of them because i do a lot of swapping quilts off and on my frame so each quilt gets its own set of leaders okay um we talked last time about the super leader let's see that super leader do you have one therefore i do and we got the measurements so the secret super leader is 27 inches deep that's the depth yeah so that is from the the distance from here to here 27 inches yes and the reason why you'd like to have this longer or deeper one is so that you're not bending over constantly to pin so johnny can i get you to undo that backing bar there and we'll actually pull that super leader up so on a studio frame it can come all the way up to this top bar to pin which makes it really nice on your back right and on if you have a gallery frame it's even deeper so it's harder to reach so this extra length really helps save you yeah so if you have the gallery frame that's the forte infiniti these come standard with your frame purchase so those that super leader comes as part of your leader set if you have the the studio frame that's the amarra the avante those come standard with just the same depth that's the 17 inch depth yeah again if you those are available for purchase the the super leader you can get separately yes or as part of the gallery set so that's how they're listed on our website we'll say the gallery set or the super leader is available individually so we just want to be really clear on that and again it's 27 inches deep this way or 17 inches deep okay and again you can get them in different lengths depending on your frame size or you can just buy a big set and cut it down so it's not quite so long and i just want to point out also that the leaders don't go all the way to the end of your polls they stop about six inches because that's as far as your machine can go so you don't want to think that you're going to be able to stitch that full length and have a quilt pinned on and then realize oh my machine can't go there so they will be shorter than your your pulls yeah i've done that before i've got one on right now that's pretty close pushing the limits pushing the limits yes okay so we have this one we've already pinned this up here and we always make sure we smooth that leader out as we're yeah that one's rolling we're twisted back there we'll let it fly for right now for right now yep so we're going to talk about prepping attaching your quilt to the leader you have an example right yes let me pull that out here okay so i mentioned just a minute ago that i have lots of projects that are always going at the same time and so i have multiple sets of leaders so this is just an example of a project i can't even count how many times this has been put on and off of different machines and so i've got a smaller leader set so you can see that it is shorter in length on the leaders because i've cut it down and my favorite part is i basted this on so instead of pinning i actually took this to my sewing machine put a basting stitch on and then that way when i'm taking it on and off i don't have to deal with the pins poking me because i do that a lot how many times do i say we need band-aids right next to our machines yeah i like to bleed yeah me too so so that's an option if you don't want a pin you can always based onto your leaders so okay so next we're going to talk about preparing i'll take that preparing your backing and then what to do with a back that's not square okay so we want to have a good foundation when we're quilting and our backing is one of those foundations so if we start out with a backing that's not square we're kind of setting ourselves up for failure right so one way that i like to check to make sure that my backing is square is i will just fold it in half with the selvages lining that up okay so johnny i'm going to fling this up here we'll see if we can see if you look along this edge down at that other end it's not the same so even though i measured the length the length might be the same but it might be kind of a diagonal right shape a trapezoid i don't know whatever we call it yes us and our math skills not so great it's fine okay so if i wanted to make this square to start with i'm going to fold it in half again lining up my selvages just like so and then i would take a a large square ruler or use my grid and trim this so that it is a straight line and then i know that it is square it should be fitting onto my leaders perfectly and then i'm again having that good foundation to start with so if you are just doing quilting for yourself just make sure you square that back up first and again if you have people bringing you quilts your quilting for others ask them to do that for you before they do that you know and you might teach that like i remember my quilter before when i was paying for quilting they would they were always teaching me different things that i could do to make my quilts better for them to quilt so that's something you can add to your repertoire yep start with the foundation start with a good foundation so next let's talk about minky oh everybody loves minky right right everyone loves everyone loves the feel of minkie who loves working with minke on their long arms we get a lot of questions um uh which how should i pin on or how should i attach my minke to the leaders yes so minky can be a little bit tricky to work with for some people and there's a lot of people that are intimidated by it but it is very usable i love working with minky quick tip if you are seaming the back i'm going to share one of my embarrassing stories you guys probably already know did not do this but i just folded my backing in half because it was just a solid piece of fabric and i seamed it along but when i open it up the nap went one way and then the other way right so learn from my mistakes don't seam your minky that way so make sure when you seam at the nap naps go in the same direction yes and another tip if like you have a directional top the back should be directional as well that your nap is going the same direction as the top yes okay so what do you think is the biggest concern with dealing with minke stretch straight very stretchy okay so this minky it stretches pretty good that direction going the other way it doesn't really stretch much okay so loading your minky is personal preference some people like to load the stretchy way across so that they have control as they're pinning to make sure it's not stretching out and then as they're advancing and rolling that fabric as they're tightening the bar it's not stretching because that's the the direction so some people like to do it that direction some people like to turn it and do the selvage side on the bar because it lays flat and it's easy to pin on if you do it that direction you do have to be very careful when you're advancing that you don't over tighten the backing and stretch that minky out because if you stretch it out and you quilt on it when you take it off it's going to shrink back up and it's not always going to be pretty it's not going to be cute so those are some tips with minke do you have any other tips that you want to know no i no i usually i think i pin i pin the stretchy so i can kind of control it and then the other way rolled the yeah so i do it that way what about you um i actually do it both ways and here's my reason why sometimes i get minky that has a seam in it so let's talk about seams let's talk about seamed backs our next question so with seam backs i prefer to always have my seam going horizontal to the poles and the reason for that is that when i'm rolling it up i don't have all of that build up of the seam in one spot it's just spread out over the whole quilt it just goes through one time and it makes it a lot easier so if i have minky and it's got a seam horizontally i'll load it horizontally no matter which direction the stretch is right so this back we purposely pieced and well we pieced it but we loaded it so the seam was vertical so we can show you how you would kind of the trip the tips you can use to adjust with that right so sometimes you can't avoid loading it without the seam going vertically right so you might have a quilt top that's directional and you have to load it that direction so like we said sometimes it's not avoidable so let's give a couple tips so johnny i'm going to put my ratchet down will you put your ratchet down on that one also and then just tighten this up and we're going to see if people can tell we've got this seam here so we've got lots of bulk right through here where i've rolled it over and over and over itself which in turn makes our ends a little bit saggier these are loosey-goosey this is really tight right here and kind of loose on the ends so there are a couple things that we can do okay as you're rolling it up i like to massage it here and like pull it even tighter so that it's kind of spreading it out a little bit more right another thing that works really nicely is to roll the backing back and forth on the poles okay so which brings us to our first show us that item up for bid just kidding so we were talking about this hand wheel this is the handy hand wheel i think it's called the hand wheel kit the hand wheel kit yes so the hand wheel comes on this back pole you can add it to this front pole yeah we suggest you we will it only can fit really on this front pull well you can't really put on this one but you really wouldn't want to but it fits really well right here on the front pole and so then i can take off my lat my ratchets and and i like to call this the double dutch if we were doing jump rope this is a really small back but so you can go back and forth and it just eases in that tightness the fullness a little bit more so it's not quite so evident when you get to the top of that backing one thing i do want to point out with our hand wheel kit is that it is frame specific so if you have a studio frame you need to order the studio one if you have a gallery frame you need to order the gallery and you you can actually use it on either pole but you can only use it on one of the front poles at a time okay thank you yeah because i've switched mine back and forth and it does work but you can't put one on each of these poles that they run into each other and cause problems so johnny so up next is let's stitch okay so you're gonna show us how to put your batting on and we did have another question on uh in the facebook comments on which direction to put the batting so which which one do you put up or down um i like to feel my batting so go ahead and feel your some some brands you can fill it a lot more some are kind of bumpy right and then one side's a little bit smoother yeah i put the bumpies down bump these down so i've heard people say pimples down dimples up because you don't want to see the pimples so they go on the bottom and so those are the little pokey audies because we all know how that works right so i'm going to turn mine over upside down so now we have the bumpies down yep and i am going to just slide this under here okay johnny what's another great trick for getting your batting in what what all the pull cradles yeah we talked about those before as well yeah and if you don't have these you can add them to your frame so that just gives you a little space under there and i actually added the pull cradles to my old frame and i did all by myself i did the tools i didn't cry it was fabulous so if i can do it anybody can do it awesome okay so now we've got our batting down and we want to do what we call a plumb line it's just a straight line across and we're going to unhook this so there are three different ways that you could do your plumb line you can use the little c clamps the horizontal channel locks or you can use your pro-stitcher channel locks or i'm going to show you another trick can you see how i'm hitting that i'm going to use that i'm going to just pull up my bobbin thread first i like this one this was kind of smart so we just stitch along just hugging that back bar awesome okay johnny will you cut those threads will i get this top ready yes i'd love to okay so we've got this plum line here now i'm just going to take my quilt top which i've already loaded i'm going to pull it up and we want to use a actual quilt top this time to show the direction so you can see it round up on the bar there yep so i'm just lining it up right with that plumb line that's already there johnny what do you call it when people can pin is it magic fingers magic in your hands that's right okay i'm going to do magic fingers so i pinned that right in place there and i would pin a couple more spots oh there's my pins sorry look they're hiding from me so you like to pin your top down i do because you have magical fingers because i have magic in my fingers oh that looks great hey thanks so a tip with pinning this top is that sometimes we get a little bit of stretch in our tops especially if you've got wavy borders so i like to really keep my top square to begin with so if that means i need to pull this top in just a little bit so it's lined up and then just ease in some fullness as i go along i'm going to do that same with on this side i don't want to tighten it all the way out to the point where it's stretched out wider than the main part of the quilt okay did we get those threads trimmed yep okay so i just bring my machine back over again and once you have that plumb line set you don't necessarily need to do channel locks on this one it's already pinned in place but you can i usually do so it's again personal preference so i'm just again going to stitch if you do have extra fullness in your top you can take your free hand here and just push down a little bit and that will help ease in some of the fullness i love that trick there that you just showed because sometimes you do get a wavy border sometimes you know if someone hasn't put the borders on quite right or it's just wavy yeah and we are going to talk about vintage tops in the future a couple of in a few weeks so we'll talk more about that so i'm getting a little crazy i probably should have gone a little slower maybe pinned a little more but you get the idea right so i'm going to stop right there unpin and you notice i didn't break my threads i'm going to now put my ratchet down on my top tighten it up smooth everything out and then i'm going to just baste down this side so johnny you might have noticed i did not use my vertical channel lock no sometimes i'm a rebel sometimes i don't do that thank you you're welcome so with the vertical i a lot of times we'll just eyeball it if it's a quilt that i'm really really needing to make sure it's perfectly square i'll put the channel locks on vertically right so i'm just going to come over to the other side of the quilt face down this side i think it's worthy of noting we probably wouldn't really use this backing on this top so if you're wondering why we're using this cute fabric on the top and this other cute fabric on the back that maybe don't go together we just did it for demonstration purposes we will not quilt it out like this oh it'd be lovely though i know it's okay okay so anything else we need to cover i would just like to say how important it is to base those sides a lot there's a lot of controversy over whether to base the sides or not base the size right if you want your quilt to turn out square baste your sides okay and keep it square as you're going out i didn't put my clamps on we didn't put the side clamps on so do your side clamps and base down the sides that's a great reason to um to keep it square as well yep and you only baste the section that you're in and as you advance then you would do the next section so before we go i wanted to point out one other thing that we have on our frame and what is that it's called our handy hammock okay and i'm going to pull up this batting so that everybody can see down here we've got this hammock here so on a regular sized quilt my batting would be draped on the floor and i'd be stepping on it if you have animals they like to play in there so this handy hammock is really nice because you can just take your batting and lay it right in that hammock it keeps it off the ground it keeps it out of the way and um i have a feature i have a puppy dog that likes to cuddle in the batting it's not great yeah cuddling's better for personal quilts yeah yeah okay so before we end let's talk about this quilt behind us here this is another vintage top one of our um tops made by anonymous quilters purchased maybe off of ebay or somewhere it was quilted by one of our educators or national educators mary yoder from california so isn't that beautiful i love that the quilting she did is just amazing all right so thanks for watching handy quilter watch and learn we look forward to seeing you again next week

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 14,725

Rating: 4.9849625 out of 5

Keywords: Handi Quilter, Longarm, Sewing, Quilting, Quilts, Free-motion Quilting, Finishing Quilts, quilter, longarm quilt, quilting tips

Id: 83zvdMKp7Cg

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020