Demo of the Sweet Sixteen and Some Quilt Talk

[Music] do [Music] do [Music] welcome quilt roadies thank you for stopping by i thought today since i am going to be doing a little bit of quilting on my sweet 16 that i would just talk about that while i stitched now um just to give you a little bit of life updates around here it is in the hundreds the temperature is in the hundreds and um i mean we hit the triple digits and the smoke has blown in from the fires that are in eastern oregon and probably some that are in washington so you don't want to be like running outside it has that kind of hazy look to it and when you go outside you can kind of smell it a bit which is always a little bit disconcerting but we are hunkered down in the house and and i've been enjoying myself with some stitching i've been doing some plotting about quilts you'll notice i've laid out a little quilt behind me it's a charm pack quilt and i am the oldest cousin my mother was the oldest sibling and um when you think about your grandparents there really wasn't the uh even the thought process of limiting the number of children you had in many countries you lost children to a variety of diseases or whatever happened and so my grandmother had several children she lost three of them and my mother was the oldest so i have cousins who are having their first babies so this is a baby quilt because this is my year to give handmade gifts i know i've said that before i i am i just really i like that i like thinking about the person and especially a baby quote what's not to love about a baby quilt but i mean it kind of crept up on me two of my cousins delivered this week and so i gotta get going you know i i don't know i it like that nine months just flew by so i decided this morning to uh put the design wall to work and i love charm packs and especially when it has to do with like novelty fabrics or children's fabrics and this particular charm pack and you know you probably can't get it anymore now because you know a lot of my stash has been curated over several years but this was a a line of fabric by moda called coral queen of the sea so maybe you'll see it out there but um uh coral queen of the sea and so i just kind of laid out the charm pack and then i looked for um fabric that would go with it and as it turns out many times i did not have enough of this light pink that i wanted to use so i had to readjust my thinking and i found a creamy white so i alternated on the diagonal the creamy white and the um pale pink with this uh charm pack and it's so cute because it has it has um you know everything under the sea you know octopus fish you know and you can kind of move things around and you stand back and then you look at how your you placed your color between the light and the darks but really with the baby quilt it's just one big smile it's not like you're losing sleep over your value you just want to make someone smile and so i laid it out and the next step for me will be to take a photograph of it because naturally when you start sewing the pieces you forget how you had it laid out with that said i thought cheese you know in past um sewing rooms i had my design wall a little bit different area and i thought wow i wish my regular sewing machine was here where i could just turn around and pick them up and sew them oh that smoke excuse me bless me um but the positive part of this is that i have to get up from my sewing chair and walk over here and take the now some people could just pile these up across and know how to sew them oh i've tried that before i i don't have that kind of brain you know so i'm gonna have to have the um my phone with the photograph and then lay the row out and sew it together that way and then i am hoping that i will i have a backing fabric already for it that's this print here and when i go to retreat in september i will quilt it but who knows i might quilt it sooner if i get it done sooner i mean the baby's already here and both babies are absolutely adorable they're just absolutely adorable of course my cousins are beautiful cheryl who is a friend of mine here in the next town over from me you know is um part of the flosstube community that i have embraced but she and her sister are also quilters and they do quite a bit of quilting promotion for fat quarter shop and cheryl does a lot of quilting for friends and she wanted to come over and see how the sweet 16 functions and and i know many of you asked this you know why a sweet 16 as opposed to a long arm and cheryl has a long arm it's kind of like what your body can tolerate and so for me i've had two long arms but it came to i realized there was a realization that um body mechanics wise that i couldn't long term do the long arm plus i was not the type of personality that was comfortable doing other people's quilts so that's like a big piece of machinery a big monetary investment it takes up a lot of real estate in your sewing room and if you're not gonna make money or you're not making like at this point in my life i am not even making a quilt a month so is a long arm uh cost effective although not all decisions have to be about that it's what you love really um so i mostly made the decision based on body mechanics in my own back and neck and decided to go with the sit down machine what i do love about the sit down machine because i could have quilted on my domestic sewing machine but i love this the way this machine faces there's uh you get a real open view of what you're quilting on and the throat space is huge so i love that i love that and with uh even with the larger throat spaces of domestic machines that have come out it's still a challenge to fit a queen or king-size quilt in there which it's much easier with this you do still have the issue of layering your quilt but for me it was a it wasn't a problem because i use fusible batting i use hobbs 80 20 and so i don't have to pin my quilt and that's when i'm sewing i'm not having to stop and take the pins out like i used to when i would quilt on my domestic machine so this quilt here this is a table runner one of the table runners that was on the rack that i showed before and it was a charm pack creation that i did and it i found a backing i layered my fusible batting on it on my big board ironing board and then my top and then i steam pressed it all together so that the three layers are together and they're not going to come apart in the time that you're quilting but even with that what i do initially is i anchor it i stitch in the ditch around the um edge of the block just to make sure it's not going to shift and i don't get any puckering in the back and then i'll do whatever i want to do quilting wise i wear gloves you can get quilting gloves they have like little nubs on one you know on the palm side these are a fonzen porter glove and i got these at joann's i think that's where i got these you know but i've used garden gloves the only thing is you want kind of a weight that's not going to make you hot the other thing about the sweet 16 and probably for any any sewing machine actually is that you have to thread it right and because i get confused i actually cut the thread off at the spool when i'm done or i need to change the color and uh then i thread my machine following where the previous thread was that's because i just know i'm going to miss some step and if you miss just one step you get not good tension between and then i start my stitching and i check my tension before i really go to town and then quilt so let's do a little bit of it okay [Laughter] now um this is programmable with a lot of different features one is needle down so that when you stop the needle is down so your piece doesn't slip out you also can regulate the speed of the machine so i have it set at 30 percent only because i haven't done it in a while and it takes me a moment to get my rhythm back you know i was if you ever see those tick tock videos with the dancers that wouldn't be me i'd be tripping over my feet now whenever i um stop i reposition i don't try to over extend my arms i reposition everything [Laughter] and and here's another thing the best part is you don't have to like reposition to go a different direction you just go the different direction so where i was going perpendicular now i'm going horizontal and see the nubby part of the gloves kind of grip the quilt so you're not like trying to you know it's all about the longevity of your being able to quilt and piece and sit at a sewing machine at our age we have to really pay attention to ergonomics and not be forcing ourselves to do something that we will pay for later and a lot of times i don't mark a lot of my quilts i will unless i want a certain motif on them but if i'm going to do um like straight line work i kind of eyeball it oh well don't tell anybody [Laughter] this is going to be a christmas gift so i'm so just so tickled that i'm already going to be having this done i have a lot of binding to do i try to do as much continuous line also i have no problems stitching over the top of previous stitching to get from point a to point b i don't lose any sleep about that [Laughter] so here where i want to go diagonally across this five inch block i am not gonna mark it don't tell anybody and i'm just gonna eyeball it and go for it it's amazing when you live quilted for a long time you can almost nail a quarter inch seam you've just seen it so much that very seldom isn't gonna be so far off that it's gonna create problems for you [Laughter] uh tension's still good i check that every so often to make sure everything is going together well i feel the most comfortable quilting quilts that are wall hanging size table runner size all the way up to throws or double size but once i get past double queen king i am at the point in my life where i'm okay sending it out to a long arm quilter looks like i might have run out of bobbin thread yep i did well we'll stop there um because you you don't want to wash me wind a bobbin but um i just wanted to give you a little peek at the sweet 16 this is a hq years ago a group of the fabric stalkers which is my quilt group back in bend oregon we took a class with angela walters who is a rep for hq and it was very informative and they brought machines in for people to try long arm machines and it is well worth taking that type of class before you invest a large amount of money um because it is exciting when you go to a vendor show when you see all the variety of long arms and short arms but taking a class ahead of time allows you to really think about where you want that buck to go and even a zoom class even though you don't have that specific machine in front of you the zoom classes that are done by hq just to see more information from the professionals is worth it because it's like you know it's it's spendy it's a chunk of change you're putting down but it is another facet of quilting that is so enjoyable it is so enjoyable so that's where we will stop the little tutorial for the day i um am looking at trying to figure out another baby quilt i have i'm a novelty fabric addict i just love the novelty fabrics and so i have whole piles of children's novelty fabrics that i need to pla plot out or plan out for um not only for my cousin but for my grandsons and um yeah just taking it a day at a time here in the beehive i am wanting to get into back into or actually delve into my wool again that went on the back burner for a few weeks here but i'm ready for that to get going again i just there's something very homey about wool it's uh it's a whole different dimension no pun intended because it is dimensional and i love to take patterns and even though i'm a pattern follower i love to tweak it a little bit to make it a little bit my own um i love mixing a little bit of the primitive and a little bit of the modern so having taken several classes with sue spargo who i just love um and currently she's teaching on madeline island which oh when i see the pictures out of there it's just amazing but i love to incorporate her stitching into my primitive wool projects because it gives them a whole different look it just gives them a whole different look than that yeah here we are it's august it's hard to believe it's august and we're supposed to go camping but oh the area we're going camping in is under an evacuation one warning because there was a fire lightning strike fire that started that might be part of this smoke too and when you have asthma you just you know my doctor sent me in to get my pneumonia shot this week and no no side effects to that hopefully it'll protect me um for this uh next cold season that's that'll be coming up yeah lots happening lots happening and i'm hoping to meet up with a few of you at pioneer quilts sometime if you're coming through portland i um i'm surprised at how close that quilt shop is to me i i thought it was going to be really hard to get to which it would have been better if it was really hard to get to but it is pretty darn easy to get there and it's such a lovely shop it is just such a lovely shop um with such a nice variety of fabrics and they even carry some flosses they carry weeks die works and cosmo because um meg hockey who is crab apple hill uses cosmo floss and so they carry a lot her patterns and a lot of the floss but a wide variety of fabrics just very eclectic choices from modern to asian to primitive buttermilk basin primitive gatherings some other people in the wool world i just can't wait till those classes or groups so stitches start happening at that shop because i'm going to be there i'm going to be there it'll be fun and yeah i hope i see some of you there well you take care thanks for stopping by hope this gave you a little bit uh another piece to your puzzle of how you want your quilting life to um you can make it as complicated or as simple as you want love you guys take care and we'll see you down the road [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Quilt Roadies

Views: 6,288

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Id: Lj2lb7INcuI

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021