Getting Started with HQ Sweet Sixteen: Working with TruStitch

a really fun product to use with the HQ sweet 16 is the true stitch which is a way that you can have stitch regulated quilting on your sit down machine a very helpful product to go along with that is the sit down overlay this lays on the top of your table and that allows the true stitch device to move freely across the table so to install the sit down overlay on your table on the back of the overlay there are three pieces of double stick tape now I found that the easiest way to install this is to slide it under your machine line it up and then we'll take the tape off one piece at a time so just go ahead and slide it and you'll notice that the cutouts fit right for the machine perfectly so we'll slide that on and make sure that it's flush on each side and then you can just lift up each corner peel off the double stick tape and then carefully lay it back down keeping it nice and aligned so you can do the side then the front and then the other side the true stitch is an optional accessory for your HQ sweet-16 it allows you to do stitch regulation quilting on your sit down machine in the package you'll find a few different things first is a user manual of course you'll need that a coaster for your controller a power cable that also has different adapters depending on the country that you live in your controller itself as well as a magnet a USB charger for the controller the machine interface cable and the receiver itself the receiver is what connects everything together so let's go ahead and get it all set up and we'll do some quilting so let's go ahead and get all the cables plugged in and you'll notice that some of these cables may look generic but anytime you need to replace a cable for some reason make sure you call handi quilter first so we'll just go ahead and go in order the first thing that you'll plug into your receiver is your power cable next you'll notice it says foot pedal so I've unplugged my foot pedal and I'm going to take the connection that would normally go in the back of my machine and plug it in here and you'll notice that it can only go in one way next is the machine cable that connects the machine to the receiver so we'll plug that in that can also only go in one way as well last is our USB charger this is what we'll use anytime we need to charge our controller between quilting alright and you'll notice the last thing is a power on/off switch we won't want to turn that on yet but when we get everything completely plugged in we'll turn it on in order so now that we've got all the cables plugged in let's go ahead and connect it to the machine we've got all our cables plugged into our receiver I want to show you how this charger for your controller will plug in on the back of your controller there's just a small port and there's only one place that that can plug in so anytime you're finished quilting you can go ahead and plug your controller in and that way it'll just be charged and ready when you need it so right now we don't need it plugged in and charged so I'm going to go ahead and remove that and let's go ahead and get everything else all plugged in so we have our foot pedal we can go ahead and put that on the floor so it's ready for us we have our power to the wall so let's go ahead and get that out of the way okay now because we plugged our foot pedal into our receiver we're going to take our machine to receiver cable and plug this end into where the foot pedal would go so you remember there's only one way that we can plug this in so we'll go ahead and do that and you can also screw this in to the connection so that this won't get pulled out at any time and finally let's go ahead and stick this right under here you can leave your receiver under here and then that way when you're quilting it's not going to fall off the edge of the table and you can use your full table space so we've got all that plugged in let's go ahead and turn everything on I've plugged the receiver power cord into the wall and now we're going to turn everything on whenever you turn on your true stage you'll always want to do machine first then the receiver and then the controller so we'll do our machine and then the receiver remember that on/off switch that we talked about now you can go ahead and turn that on and then underneath the controller there's an on-off switch here and you'll notice that when I turn it on the light blinks a few times that's good that shows that it's on so now that we have everything turned on we can go ahead and put our quilt on our table and actually do some stitch regulated quilting on your true stitch controller and receiver there are a few different lights the first hole here is a low light sensor which senses any time your controller is underneath your fabric and when that senses it it will kick on the first light so let's go ahead and put it under some dark fabric and you can see that it will kick on that sensor and this is really helpful when it's actually underneath your quilt you can kind of keep track of where it is the second light here will glow yellow if your controller needs to be charged on the receiver there are three lights the first light will blink red if it is indicating that there is a cable that's disconnected somewhere the middle light will represent if the controller needs to be charged so if your controllers running low on battery you'll see it in both of these lights and then finally the blue light just indicates that the true stitch is on and functioning there's a couple different ways that you can use your controller for your true stitch the first is this handy-dandy coaster this is really nice if you're quilting on something small like a baby quilt or a wall hanging or a placemat you can actually connect this to the edge of your quilt and then place your controller inside of it and that way as you move your fabric the controller moves along with it this is also helpful if you're trying to quilt near the edge of a quilt regardless of what size it is and when you're not using the controller there's a really easy place to put it which is just right there it's just right there when you need it the other way is using the magnet now when you have your controller underneath the fabric you can have your hand place on top of it and that will allow you to move around as you quilt and you know that the controllers there if you don't always want to keep your hand on the controller you can use the magnet and place that on top and that way as you're moving your fabric the controller is going to move at the same speed as your fabric is moving it's extremely important that it moves at the same speed and in the same direction because that's what gives you the regulated stitch if I am moving my controller further then my needle is moving then I'm not going to get a regulated stitch I want to make sure that basically my controller and my needle are always parallel to each other so if I'm doing a straight line I want to make sure I'm moving the fabric and the controller in the same direction not swiveling back and forth it's important to make sure that your controller moves at the same speed as your fabric and that they're moving in the same direction in a uniform manner you don't want to swivel like this because the fabric pretty much stayed in the same spot as far as the needle is concerned even though the controller moved quite a ways so you always want to make sure that your arms stay pretty parallel so that you can move both your controller and your fabric equal distances you'll notice on my screen it shows manual and regulated mode the regulated mode will only be present when the true stitch is connected so since we have our true stitch all set up we're in regulated mode let's go ahead and do some quilting there are two ways that I can get the machine to start quilting I can hit the start/stop button here or I can hold in the foot pedal so let's try the foot pedal first I've had it pushed all the way down but notice that my needle still isn't moving once I move my controller that's when the needle is going to start quilting you'll notice that I'm trying to keep my fabric and my controller moving uniformly this is good if i swivel my controller in any direction further than where my fabric is moving I'm going to get a lot of stitches in a very small space so I want to show you what that would look like so notice that my stitches are quite a bit tighter that's because the controller told my machine that I was moving further than I really was that's why it's so important to make sure that you move them uniform directions so now you'll notice here it says cruise with a zero percent that means right now the only time my needle is going to move is when my controller moves that's the only place that it's taking direction but say I might want it to do a minimum cruise speed so that it makes it a little more fluid while I'm moving I can turn my cruise up to let's say 5% now I'm going to push the foot pedal down and it's going to do the 5% plus whatever the controller tells it to do so let's go ahead and push in the foot pedal and you'll notice it's doing that 5% but as I move the controller the needle is going to move faster the cruise is really nice if you want to get very sharp points in your quilting because it will guarantee that you'll get a good tight stitch right in all of those points okay and then when I'm done I can release the foot pedal I can also do cruise mode with our start button here so let's go ahead and do some quilting with that now I don't even need to worry about my foot I can just use the on-screen display to turn the machine on and off there's one more setting with the stitch regulated mode on your sweet 16 and that is the stitches per inch now I can use the controller just as normal but I can also decide how tight I want my stitches to be so if I want my stitches to be fairly tight then I can still move the controller at the same speed but it's going to give me 16 stitches per inch instead of 10 which is what it was at before so let's compare the difference so you'll notice that I was moving the control at it controller at about the same speed that I was moving it before but I have quite a tighter stitch per inch and that's what we want because we chose 16 stitches per inch on the other side of that we can change the stitch per inch to something quite larger and then as we're quilting we'll get a bigger stitch per inch so you can see that I had to move my controller quite a bit further to get the stitching in place the magnet on the controller is very helpful say you want to use a ruler or a template of some kind and you still want to use the controller you can go ahead and just slide this to a convenient spot I like to put it behind the needle because then it's out of the way but it's still getting the data that it needs to send to the Machine and I also have an overlay on the table so that there's a nice smooth surface for the controller to glide across so now you'll notice both my hands are flat and let's do some more quilting we'll turn it back up to ten stitches per inch and I can still move the fabric and that controller moves along with it so if I want to take a ruler I can place a ruler use that hand here I don't have to worry about holding the controller with my other hand I can just use the fabric and I can still get my stitch regulation now handi quilter has quite a few different rulers that are really fun to use on the sit down sweet 16 and you'll notice that I have little pieces of grip tape on the back these are called the Handy grips and handi quilter sells these you can cut them to any size that you need and place them on your rulers that way as you're sliding around you're not going to have you're not going to need to worry about how your ruler is sliding out of place you can put your hand flat on it push down your foot pedal and get a really nice straight line the Handy group comes in a package of eight different strips so that you can use them on whichever rulers you like so the rulers are really nice for getting some good straight lines that you can use with your true stitch now as I've been quilting my true stitch has been staying in the same part of my quilt and I've moved it kind of far away from me at any point in time while you're quilting you can stop quilting and move it closer and then continue on another really fun ruler is the Handy versa tool and it has a few different edges it has a scalloped edge in an angled edge a straight edge and then it also has this cute half circle so let's go ahead and we'll use our true stitch still and let's do a half circle you'll notice that my cruse is set to 5% and you'll find that as your quilting whether it's with rulers or doing micro quilting you'll start to see which crews setting you like the most so I'm going to go ahead and turn this up to about 12 percent to show you the difference I find that the higher the cruise the little it's a little smoother as I'm quilting some people even like to match their stitches per inch with their cruise speed so let's go ahead and do some more quilting with the cruise set at 12% so I have my cruise set to 12% and let's go ahead and we'll just echo what we just did I just moved it down a little bit and this is also when the grip tape is super handy because as you're doing curves sometimes it's easy to push hard on it or kind of stray away from it and that grip tape really just helps hold it in place so you'll see that my cruise is set higher but it's also going to regulate as I move and that ruler just gave me a really nice curved edge one thing that's really handy when using the true stitch is the needle stop position button so you'll notice as I push it it toggles between up and down but say you're doing a ruler that you want to get a very perfect corner edge I'm going to put it in needle down position and that way when I'm done quilting the needle is going to stop in the fabric and that will allow me to make sure that I stop at a perfect point the other thing is the start and stop button on screen if you're doing a large area of quilting and you don't want to worry about what your foot is doing you can just push the start button here and then push it again when you're done so let's go ahead and have it in needle down and we'll use the on screen start and stop when you're using the true stitch sometimes you'll just want to use it to fill in a large space on your quilt and it may not always be comfortable to keep your foot pushing on the foot pedal so there's a start button here on the screen and you can use that instead of the foot pedal and the way that it works is once you hit the start button if you're set to cruise mode then the needle will start cruising but then it'll also stitch as you move the controller so let's go ahead and fill in some of this fabric with some cool quilting I have my true stitch all set up I have my stitches per inch set at 10 and I also have my cruise speed set at 10 so let's go ahead and fill in this fabric using the start button from the on screen display that way I don't even have to worry about pushing the foot pedal with my feet you'll notice that as I've used the true stitch controller that for the most part all of my stitches have been pretty regulated at 10 stitches per inch now I want to show you the difference so I'm going to go ahead and take off this controller we're going to set it aside and I'm going to put the machine in manual mode and I want you to see that as I move my arms I have to match my arm speed with the machine speed because now I become the stitch regulator I have to always make sure that I'm moving at the speed that the machine is moving so that I can still get a consistent stitch and I'm also going to be using the foot pedal for this right now I have my manual speed set at 50% that means I'm going to need to move my arms at a fairly quick pace not the fastest that they need to go but also it's not going to be a slow walk in the park so let's go ahead and do that you'll notice that as I moved my arms I got fairly consistent stitches because I was matching my arms with what the machine was doing but it's not perfect so I want to show you the difference between when I move my arms too fast and when I move my arms too slow compared to what the machine is set at so you can see how that's going to affect my stitch length so let's move it too fast for what the machine is running which is 50% you'll notice that all of my stitches are quite large I would say that that put it at about four stitches per inch which is pretty big now I'm going to move my arms slower than what the fifty percent would call for and you can see that my stitches are quite small I would say that's almost 18 to 20 stitches per inch so you'll see that as you move the fabric when you're in manual mode you need to be able to match what the manual speed is doing so if I am moving my fabric and it's consistently large stitches that means I'm moving too fast I can do one of two things I can slow down my arms or I can speed up my machine so let's move at the speed that we did when we got these big stitches but I'm going to put the speed at a hundred percent and now we can compare the differences so I would say I've moved my arms at the same speed I did before but you'll see especially right here my stitches are almost twice as small as they were before so whether you're using regulated mode or manual mode it's just kind of about learning what speeds feel good for doing certain things now if I was trying to fill in a large space then maybe eighty to a hundred percent would be comfortable but if I'm trying to do micro quilting I would do something like 25 percent so as you get more and more comfortable with your sweet 16 you'll start to feel what works and what doesn't and you'll start to remember which speeds work for different types of quilting and it's just about learning and practicing and having fun

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 44,675

Rating: 4.8779659 out of 5

Keywords: TruStitch, Handi Quilter, HQ Sweet Sixteen, Longarm, Quilting, Free-motion Quilting, Stitch Regulation

Id: bjcFMzvkuGs

Length: 23min 14sec (1394 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015