How to Load a Quilt on a Longarm Quilting Frame with Leah Day

hello Michel tink friends my name is Lia day and welcome to this long iron quilting tutorial I want to quilt a new quilt on my grace Kunik machine and this continuum frame so I need to load this up so it's ready to go so in this video I'm going to show you all the steps to loading a quilt on the frame getting all the layers smoothed out and basis basically basting your quilt but instead of having to spread it out on the floor spread it out over a table and spend a lot of time working with that batting backing fabric and smoothing everything out you load it on the long arm frame and it speeds up the process tremendously and this is the main reason I'll be completely honest that I really wanted to switch to a quilting frame because I just reached a point where I was just so tired of the basting process when quilting on my home machine so this is the process that I take for all of the quilts whenever I'm getting started working on the grace Q Niq so the quilt that I'm gonna be working on this is actually one of my unfinished projects so it's also helping me achieve the goal of quilting my quilts and getting a lot more finished this year this is the double stripe diamond quilt and you can find this free quilt pattern at lia DICOM slash stripe so if you'd like to make this too and follow along you absolutely can come in download the free quilt pattern and make this quote with me so in the piecing process I always starch my fabric before cutting so the quilt tab the finished quilt top still feels nice and stiff and stable and I just folded it up and kind of kept it in a drawer this length of time while it's been unfinished so this is really perfectly fine state I don't usually do anything to my quilt tops before quilting them before basting or quilting so I'm just gonna fold this up and set it aside because the first step is to work with our backing fabric so now let's talk about your backing fabric and so this is what you're going to get started with whenever you are beasting your quilt on the long arm or whenever you're installing your quote on the long arm so I take my backing fabric and I fold it in half to create a little crease here and I'm gonna line that up with the center of my leader cloth okay so leader cloth is this specialty slightly thicker cloth and this actually comes with the grace continuum frames so it comes with it and what you want to do is install the leader cloth on the frame and mark the center point and you can line that up there's a center mark where your rails come together in the middle that's your center point and then you can carry that down to the end of your leader cloth so line up the center mark on your backing fabric with the center mark on that leader cloth and then place a pen and the pens that I'm using are slightly thicker and longer then like the normal pens that I would use for patchwork and they're meaty yeah this is the only thing holding the quilt to the frame and it does hold it under tension so I like to use a nice thicker pen for this job and another thing I am a little bit fastidious about this and I'm gonna emphasize it a pen in the middle first and then I'm gonna pin straight to the right with all of the pens pointing to the right and so and I'm also pinning so that the head of one pen is hitting the point of the one before it and because you really want to think of these pins being placed almost like stitches they are really needing to lock the quilt into place and the reason why I'm pinning it all in one direction is so we don't get stuck by the Pens and I got stuck a few times and I've already bled on this leader cloth so everything that I do is with an aim to not get stuck by the Pens so once I finish pinning all the way to one side then I'll start back in the middle and work to the opposite side so one thing that I kind of glossed over is which direction to install your quilt in and this is a choice actually and you know especially for a smaller quote you have a choice whether to set it up on your frame so that the long side of your quilt runs with the frame or the short side of your quill runs with the frame and let me grab a picture here of the quote just to emphasize this this is the double straight diamond quilt and how I'm installing it in the frame is this way so that as I quilt it it's gonna advance through the frame and roll it up onto the rollers just like this and what this means is as I'm quilting I can quilt a whole long section of it in one go if I you know let's see it was longer I wouldn't be able to do that because really this is almost maxing out the length of my 8-foot frame here if it was longer than I have to go this way and they quote would be rolled up and you could see I could still quote a good chunk of it but I would have to advance it so many more times through the frame you know every time basically I'd stitch a cross I need to advance the quilt again so keep this in mind as you're installing your quilts and planning your quilts to put on a frame whether you want to quote them horizontally or vertically if you were wanting to do like let's say something really simple straight lines right across it well obviously you'd want to install the quilt like this so it rolls onto the frame in this direction so that way you can stitch those straight lines all the way across really really quickly and get it done fast so there we go so that's my plan here kind of went over how I'm pinning the backing fabric to this first take-up rail and then I'll meet you back here whenever it's all pin in place and we're ready to move to the next step so as you can see I've got my backing pinned up to this top leader and that's ready to roll on but before I do that I want to cut my quilt batting so this is quilters dream polyester batting I really like it because it's nice and thin needle punched and this is the select thickness and this cool it's gonna be used as a tablecloth so I think this is gonna be a really good choice so I always buy king-size batting and then spread it out and cut it down to the size that I need and that's just about an inch or two shorter than the backing fabric so I've got the spread out nicely here and I just grab really big honkin berry scissors these are dads I'll just snip this off and try and cut it as straight as I can so that's where I'm gonna cut it and move it here and obviously you don't want to cut through your backing fabric you want to just cut through that batting and by making the batting you know bigger basically then your quilt and making sure that the backing fabric is bigger than your quote it's just making sure that you know the quilt top has more than a Froome to spread out and you're not going to cut it too close so there we go that's how I trim that down and get it the right size and I can save this and do lots of other projects this is a good baby quilt size I really think it saves money to going ahead and go with the biggest size of batting and get a king and then cut that down you're gonna end up with lots of leftover bits no matter what size of batting that you go in so that just is my process that's just what I end up using okay so that's cut down at least the right width now we need to go for a length so I'm going to unfold it there's quite a lot here so I'm going to take a second here to just spread this out let it drape all the way down to the floor and that way I can cut it off along the links to make sure that I have it just exactly the right size so now that my batting is cut to size I'm gonna set this aside so just pull it back off again and you know if that seems a little cumbersome or clunky to you and you don't like the idea of cutting your batting on the frame where you could cut you know accidentally obviously knick your leader cloths you could Nick the backing you could do that on a table this is just you know it's still a learning process for me to figure out the best system and that's been working so far I have gotten a little in trouble a few times I will admit not preparing that at this stage not having the batting cut at the stage and I've accidentally cut not enough batting for a quote once that was a little bit of a disaster I think fully it was just like a practice project so it wasn't that big of a deal okay so now it's time to start rolling the quilt up and I've got these little ratchet things on the side so make sure to close my ratchets and you can hear them as I start to roll the quilt onto this bar so this is your take-up bar and what you want to do is just be careful and tell those pins are kind of sealed up in the fabric you want to be real careful when you're running your hands back and forth along this you don't want to run your hand obviously my pens were pointing this way I don't want to run my hand right into them because that will really hurt you know those heavy-duty pens they are they can pack a punch really okay so one thing to keep in mind is as you're rolling up just to keep some tension on this and you want to keep it even so you can see how this side was looking just a little bit loose and it was kind of pulling up just in rolling around just a little bit more than the other side so keep a little bit of tension on this and maybe even pull it down around the front bar so that way it rolls up nice and even in fact actually I think I'm gonna unroll and re-roll this if ever you feel like things just aren't going right start all over again it takes a minute but that minute can make a big difference now these leaders are being held on to the frame with a very heavy-duty piece of velcro but so if you put too much tension on it obviously that velcro can start to pull off too so just watch out for that and see now this looks much better I've got a lot more tension on that it's nice and smooth I you know this that you know the bar itself was just feeling kind of squishy and I didn't like that so that's why I unrolled and rear old okay so now as I'm rolling up one thing I'm looking at I'm looking over here on the edges to make sure that the fabric is stacking up on top of itself that means that these sides of the backing fabric are going on nice and straight so just keep an eye on that if you see that the fabrics maybe slipping inside kind of run your hand down the length of the rail just to encourage it to stack up nicely we go and keep on rolling and you don't need to roll up the entire quilt because the next step is to pin and roll the opposite end of the quilt on to this next roll right here so we basically take the backing and attach it to the take-up rail which is the back rail and then the front rail here we're gonna pin to the other side and this is the exact same process as before I'm gonna fold the backing fabric in half and find a midpoint and then start it in the middle where I've marked the leader cloth and pen from that midpoint to one side and then pin to the other side working carefully and pinning the exact same way with the exact same heavy-duty pens so that way the backing fabric is locked really nicely and securely in place so this time I'll take this leader cloth and you can see this is a much longer leader cloth than the other one and that's intentional because that allows you as the quote as being advanced you have more space there so here we go grab my pins again and this time as you can see I'm lining up putting that fabric edge right up against the edge of the leader cloth and pinning right on that dotted line there we go and again I want to make sure all the pins are going in one direction and what it should weigh it feels natural for you I'm left-handed so I like to insert my pins so that the points are going pointing to the right that just feels natural for me more than likely if you're right-handed you will flip that and this is just a habit that I've gotten into even in just this short space of time working on the long arm just to reduce the chance of poking myself with the Pens because it really does hurt and then you bleed all over the place and it just you know it makes the day no fun so from here I'm going to pin on this line of pens and make sure that the backing fabric is completely attached to this leader cloth and I'll meet you back here when we're ready to layer on the batting in the quilt tap so I have my backing fabric completely pinned on both sides and now I'm going to start rolling this up onto this side so just like before I like to run my hands back and forth along the leader cloth being careful whenever I reach the point that the Pens start the reason why I want to make sure this leader cloth is going on nice and smooth it's because if this is real wobbly or there isn't a lot of tension on it's real squishy then the quilts really not going to roll up all that well so now it's the time that I'm kind of careful because I've got those pins right on top so I'm on seal those up pretty quick here smooth this out and then now as the quilt starts to stack up the backing starts to stack up on top of itself you can kind of keep an eye on these edges and make sure that that fabric stays nicely stacked on top of itself and that again ensures that the backing is going straight onto the frame it's evenly loaded you know so you know running your hands on both sides just ensures there's no wrinkles you can also pull off any bits of lint or fluff you know especially if your quilt top is a light top like mine you're gonna want to make sure that there's no little bits of lint that are going to show through underneath it so be watching out for that obviously this is the backing so it doesn't matter quite so much on this side but I still like to just keep it clean okay so I've got the ratchets open completely so that as I'm pulling on this bar it's unrolling from my take-up bar and if you want to add just have your ratchets going so that way it's taking up and it has a little tension on it and that's good too you're getting just a little bit off on this side so I'm just gonna smooth that out there we go this is looking good now I'm gonna pull this down to about this level cuz the back of my machine will go about the - there I want to bring it up just a little bit so that looks good right there that's what we're gonna get started and attach the backing fabric so I closed my ratchet so that way it's locked and then I'll just give this a little tighten so it's springy but it's not so tight that it's really really bouncy okay and you're just kind of that's a feeling thing you know as you quote more quilts you'll get the hang of that and just kind of get the feel for where that needs to go okay now I've got my back heat my batting I'm gonna fold this in half just like before find the midpoint and line up that midpoint with the center line of the quilt and that's marked on the leaders so that looks good I'm just gonna smooth this out going in one direction then open it up and go in the other direction there we go and you do generally want your batting to go on nice and straight too although it's a little bit harder to control it's kind of harder to figure out if you're straight and square I mean the best thing to do is just kind of even it up more or less in the middle of the frame that looks good so taking a minute to spread and smooth out my batting just over the surface of this backing fabric and now I want to stitch a nice straight line across this so far I haven't had my machine on at all so this is really the first time that I turn on my machine during the quilting process and I reach back here and click it on and why do I want to stitch a line on this because I've just got batting and backing here well I know that the backing fabric is nice and straight to the frame it's parallel it's straight to the leader all that is good and I want the quilt to be nice and straight to the frame too if I put it on here and it's kind of running at an angle I might run off the edge of my batting and backing fabric you know I want it to be nice and straight across so I'm sure it's going to fit so the way we do that is to stitch a nice straight line right across the frame and I'm going to do that using a little tool called channel locks it's actually a little feature on the machine and I kind of like this looks like a good place to start so I'm kind of coming in about maybe an inch off the batting just to make sure that I have batting all the way to this edge in fact actually I need to come down just a little bit more that looks good and so the channel locks are just a little a little lever here on that wheel and that locks the quill the machine so here I can I can wiggle it just a little bit but I really can't move forward and back I can only move side-to-side here now I've got white ice Accords red thread it up in the machine and I'm going to hit my up and down button and bring my thread up to the surface so that way I can hang on to it and this line of stitching is actually not going to end up in the finished quilt this is going to be off the edge of the quilt so you can really stitch this with whatever you've got in your machine at the time it really doesn't matter so now I'm just gonna stitch across and I'm watching out for you know anything weird happening if the batting starts to lump up or anything like that but really I took my time smoothing this out so it's looking really good and you don't want to stitch too fast and I have noticed that you know every once in a while my thread might decide to do something weird in fact actually it just hopped out of a guide there so when I'm pop it back in that guide so it's behaving well and get started again there we go that's probably gonna work a lot better sometimes your thread will just break whenever it pops out of a guide sometimes you'll just have really bad tension yeah I can feel it but honestly it totally does not matter because like I said this line of stitching is off the edge of the quilt it's gonna get cut off or covered up in the binding once the quilt is completely complete so totally doesn't matter so I'm gonna stitch all the way across and then I'll be ready to attach my quilt so at this stage you might be wondering what we're gonna do this batting cuz it's just draped over the front of the frame at this stage and I just take it and squish it between the two rails so there's an upper front rail and then there's a lower rail and I just squish it between those two rails and I find that you know fabric and fiber like to stick to each other and generally that's all I need to do with that batting it just drapes to the back and it stays out of my way and it kind of sticks a little bit to that lower rail a bit and that's all I do with that and now it's time to grab the quilt top okay so we're gonna spread this out here and again you want to find that midpoint pretty much the main thing if you want to take anything away from this video it's just how simple loading is it always involves finding the midpoint to all of your pieces whether it's the batting the backing or the quilt top you're always going to want to know where that midpoint is on both sides of whatever you're loading up okay so I've got my midpoint marked here and I'm gonna line that up again with that line marked on the center of the leader and now I'm just gonna spread out the quilt over the surface it feels like I could use just a little bit more tension on my backing so I just gave it one little click now just smooth this out and what I'm doing is I'm lining up the edge of the quilt with that line I just stitched using my channel locks and what that ensures is that the quilt is lined up with that nice straight line which runs parallel with the frame and that means that the quilts gonna go in and be parallel with the frame nice and straight and square to the frame too so this is a stage to kind of be a little picky about your quilt definitely a white quilt like this you want to make sure that there's no lint or anything that's being trapped between the batting and the white quilt top you want to double check that just generally get everything nice and smooth and flats so now I'm going to open up my channel locks unlock it basically and now move the machine so that I am about a quarter inch inside the edge now it's just basically right on that edge and what I'm doing there is just making sure that the stitching I'm going to do here is going to be within the area that is going to be bound that will be trimmed and bound when the quilt is finished because I don't really want this stitching to show this is again just locking the quilt to the frame making sure everything's lined up and then I'm planning on switching to hot pink thread anyway so I'll make sure to do that for mine once I actually start quilting so once I am happy with my placement I pull my thread up to the surface I make sure to lock that channel lock again so that way I am stitching nice straight line across and then this time I'm actually going to do a little bit more wiggling of the quilt just as I stitch along that edge making sure that I'm not overshooting that line before I'm keeping that edge nicely lined up with the edge of that stitching so I'm keeping the edge of the quilt lined up with the stitching from before and as you can see this is just a little slower but it's not nearly as slow as basting a quote on a table I gotta say this definitely has advantages and I have taken quotes that have B stood on a table and quilted part of it on a whole machine and then moved it to the long arm the process was very similar you know just a matter of pinning the backing fabric making sure it goes on nice and straight and then smoothing out everything as you go so you can move a quilt from a whole machine to a long arm and then back again you could take a coil off the long arm and go back to your home machine and you can also base if you would like to do long arm basting you can rent time in a local area if there is a long arm like a quilt shop that offers that then you could based your quilts this method using water-soluble thread okay so as you can see things got just a little bit off here so I'm just spreading and smoothing things out and this is another thing that I have noticed and that is you know working on a long arm everything is is very much emphasized doing the straightness of your quilt the squareness of your quilt the accuracy of your piecing all of that is very emphasized so if you start to notice you know like weird bubbly kind of things excess fabric that can be an a sign that you've had a little bit of a struggle with your piecing and that you might want to check in on your piecing skills and just kind of pay more attention to how things are going together any kind of force fitting force quilting where you've kind of squished one thing right up against another thing it can create just a little bit of distortion and that's something that will become very apparent when you're using a long arm that might not be nearly as a parent when you're basting on a table and quilting on a whole machine okay so I'm just gonna keep stitching this down and that's gonna pretty much wrap up how I load my quotes on the long arm this is the process that I take for pretty much any quilt and as you can see this is a pretty big one this is maxing out my frame the quilt top is only about four inches five inches from the edge of the leader cloth so this is pretty this is probably about the biggest size quilt that I can fit on this frame comfortably so I'm gonna finish this off and I'll show you what I do with the quilt top just to finish it up so at this stage you really have two choices when it comes to what to do with your quilt you have a third rail and it has a nice long leader clock you're all unlock and you can see if I pull this out has a nice long leader cloth and you can do the exact same thing that you've done before fold the quilt top in half along that bottom edge and pin it nice and straight to the edge of this leader claw and I'll admit I did that several times I did it the right way several times and then I got a little lazy and realize you know I can just kind of tuck the quilt here between the top the front real and that second rail and you know everything kind of just generally sticks together real nicely and I don't really think that you have to pin to that bottom rail and then grace company actually came out with a really cool little product that can help you just bypass that whole step and so these are quilt clips and what this does is you get the quilt smoothed out just exactly like I've done i smoothed out the batting smoothed out the quilt top got it all nice ready to go and then you just press these clips and then just give them a little rotate and that puts nice tension on that quilt so here I'll press this one in place just give it a little bit of a rotate and here's the last one just slide that in place give it a little rotate and I just really like that it adds a nice little bit of tension to the surface you know really flattens out the quilt top nicely and the best thing is whenever I advance the quilt through the machine it's much easier to sort everything out smooth it all out and get back to quilting so I really like this setup this is my favorite so far but of course if you have any questions about this process please post in the comments below I'm here to help you learn more about long arm quilting and speaking of long arms I am quilting on the grace unique 14-plus I was recently renamed the 15r and this is the 8-foot continuum frame and I absolutely love this combination it's so much fun to quilt and being able to move so much faster through project it really have been pleasantly surprised by how much faster long-arm quilting is I still love quilting on my home machine I really really do but when I have a project I just want to knock it out fast the long run really is the way to go now I am a dealer now for grace company and you can find this exact set up my frame and my machine set up together in a package at Leigha DICOM / frame so I hope you'll come and check it out and learn more and you know if you're interested at all in long arm quilting and this is something that you're curious about please contact us for more information I'm happy to film videos specifically for you if you have something that you're curious about you really want to learn more please let me know so check it out at lea de comm / frame until next time let's go quilt

Channel: Leah Day

Views: 93,839

Rating: 4.8786883 out of 5

Keywords: longarm quilting, longarm quilting videos, loading a longarm, longarm quilting machines, Grace Qnique Longarm, loading a quilt on a longarm frame, loading a longarm quilting machine, loading a quilt on a longarm, grace qnique, longer quilting machines, grace company, longarm machine, longarm quilting for beginners, longarm quilting tutorial, grace qnique 14+ longarm, grace qnique 14+ tutorial videos, grace qnique 15, grace qnique quilting machine, leah day long arm quilting

Id: hwJ34TArXSc

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 06 2018