Piece DIRECTLY On Your Longarm Machine! HQ Live

welcome to hq live i'm kim sandberg and with me today i have got christina whitney we're both studio educators here at handy quilter and i am so excited about what we're talking about today christina has this absolute love of piecing on the frame you want to tell us a little bit about that yes so sometimes i'm considered the lazy quilter or the frugal quilter i'm a combination of both i'll be honest okay i like to get things done and i don't want to spend a ton of time or a ton of money on it okay so um in a previous hq live right we showed some of our quilts and one of them i call my crazy scrappy quilt right and so i want to tell you about kind of my inspiration for that crazy scrappy because that's become one of my i don't want to say my signature quilt but it's one that i make a lot of i just say it's your signature and i am so excited because you're not going to only do a little show and tell here you're going to walk us through the steps and actually show us how to do this and christina has talked to me so many times about this and today i get to see it in action so that i can go home and make my own crazy scrappy quilt yes and i'm going to challenge you i know this product the hard part is i don't keep my scraps so i've got to start collecting those so let's start with a little show and tell here and you've got some quilts here yes so this first quilt is actually a quilt that my grandmother made and it's one of her crazy scrappy quilts and i just thought it was so unique and so fun and everybody loved it all my kids are always fighting over it so i thought oh i want to make something like this but it's too hard it's too hard so what what makes this one hard because i'm looking at this going it's a lot of like scraps thrown together it actually kind of reminds me of like victorian crazy quilts yeah yeah so what what is challenging about the way that your grandma did it well i don't really know what techniques she used but just looking at it i think um how do i put these pieces together and how do i get it to lay flat totally did she do this on a longer no oh wow to be honest i don't think she ever saw a long arm oh my goodness yeah so she did this all on her domestic machine but you'll notice that there are some pieces that i kind of draw edged appliqued over top because it had been so well loved that i needed to fix it a little mending yeah because a lot of these seams were they were sewn together there was so much pressure on them that they would rip apart okay we'd get these gaps yeah so i decided i was going to experiment okay i'm all about experimenting and trying new things absolutely especially on my long arm so what i did was i tried a few different techniques and i'm going to show you just a couple of those things that i've done and then we'll really get to the scrappy one the crazy the scrappy okay the crazy scrap this one reminds me of like a classic cathedral window which most people do that by hand it's super i don't know if tedious is the right word it's very time consuming and time consuming there we go yes this one i call my faux cathedral window i love it and it's all done on the long arm and so i don't have any of that piecing ahead of time so it goes by pretty quickly so it's just stitched down with the long arm on the frame you didn't do any piecing beforehand no piecing that it is raw edge on this particular quilt i love this you might have to show me this technique at a later date okay yeah because we don't have time today yeah we're going to do other fun stuff okay that is so cool though i love that oh and look at this one i feel like it's kind of that same shape again yep it's those melon shades this one is in a triangle shape though oh okay and it also looks kind of like a flower there or a circle it makes like spinning wheels yeah that is so so fun this is one of my quilts that gets the most comments on it it's all my grandmother's scrap fabric because you know i can't throw away scraps oh no and so um yeah i just cut off the the corners to make it a melon shape because they were rectangles that she'd already cut out by hand wow so and once again you did this all the piecing all the quilting on the frame correct that's amazing yeah i think we're definitely going to have to maybe delve into this again at a later date but let's let's take a look at this one so this is what the technique we're actually looking at today right yes so i call these my crazy scrappy i love it i'm so unique with my name oh i think it's great because it's crazy and it's scrappy yeah come on perfect so it's just random fabrics i never ever ever buy fabric to make these quilts oh christine i wish i had that problem i just go into the stash it's fantastic you'll notice even my binding is scrappy that even the binding and yet it all goes together so i'm guessing there's a little bit of method behind this it's not just a oh my gosh whatever comes out of the grab bag well some of them end up that way but we'll go through some of my thought process okay so let's put this one away that's so fun so this one wow so this one's a little bit more bright yeah it is it's a little bit more i don't want to say masculine but more for a boy yeah than the pastel ones yeah so when i first started doing this my my first step was since i'm not going to use or i'm not going to buy any fabric right i go into my stash and i find a piece of fabric that's large enough for backing okay and that's where i start in the size of quilt you want to make correct okay with a little bit of extra wiggle room because you know we need that extra four inches on all four sides yeah so why don't we open that up on your end and you'll see this fabric okay i'm catching a theme here we've got a little bit of a space with the primary colors love it so my backing material is my inspiration for the quilt okay so once i have my backing then i pull out scraps that are in that kind of color scheme right and go from there so if we take that back and we kind of flip this top over it so you can see there i can totally see how i even have some of that same backing fabric in there to tie it all together great that's so great and again i'm really creative with my naming spacey scrappy if you put a y on the end of anything it makes it totally fine right it's all good at least it's got a label right i know hey i'm totally impressed i'm totally impressed that it has a label that's so cool okay so so one other thing i want to point out on this particular quilt is you'll notice that my i did couching uh-huh i have different colors of yarn so not only am i using up my scrap or not scrap but my fabric that i've already got for my backing right i'm going to use scrap batting you know how when you cut off the bottom yeah you know a big piece there's always not big enough for anything yeah no unless you're doing a table runner or something yeah so i'm going to use the scrap batting okay scrap fabric on top above it pick out whatever thread i have on hand okay i'll even be really wild and crazy and use up scrap bobbins oh that's you know that bobbin that's still got a half a bobbin you don't want to just pull it off and throw it away i guess and especially if you're using a back that's a little bit busier like this one oh and i can even see here you totally have got some yeah i've got a bear you've got a variegated i love that so these are truly i mean scrappy in all respects i love this because yeah the yarn i'm a knitter and i always have those weird bits and pieces left a little bowl and it's not enough to do a project with correct yep so this one i think i used like four different yarns there's some orange there's blue using it up using what i have so fantastic these i think i haven't i'm thinking that these would be really great for like charity quilts i was just going to say that when i first started this my intention was for it to be a charity quilt okay and then what happened you fell in love with the quilt and couldn't part with it i did so yeah most of them i've kept we've never done that as quilters we don't know what she's talking about yeah i made this beautiful quilt for my granddaughter but um when i finished i don't have any grandkids but you know you always hear those stories yeah yes well i actually have quilts i've made for my daughter that i've told her who's she's 14 now i've told her when you get married you can have them and i'm probably going to start when you have your first child when you have when i'm dead in the grave you can have it okay so the process we're going to go through the entire process and hopefully you can follow how my brain works okay i want to see no guarantees well like i said i want to i want to be able to go home and do this so i know you've got your process here so i picked out some backing fabric okay we're just going to do the width of the fabric okay so i would do this you know for like a baby blanket or something on the backing piece you'll notice that i've drawn a blue mark down the side okay that is my size of where i'm going to actually quilt so as i'm working i know i need to cover that sideline to make sure and then when i'm done i can trim it off you're going to turn and everything will be covered okay i get i get where you're coming from here that way you're not accidentally going clear out here and quilting off the edge and everything else and that would be fine my biggest concern is if i don't go far enough right and i trim it off and i've got an empty spot there yeah yeah cause heaven forbid you have to reload oh he wants to do that it's clamps i know seriously i'm saved today and then i notice there's some more markings here yes so i've got lines on the top here and you could draw the line all the way across and that's just giving me some space to load right and then um gives me a little bit of wiggle room but that's the line that i will actually cut off or when i do my basting that's going to be my basting line going across across the top okay i love that but i've got a couple more marks you do and do that it's not a science like i said i just make this up as i go okay um but i want to be able to kind of gauge how far i am on my quilt okay so i marked a quarter of the way down okay a half of the way down three quarters and then my ending you're ending okay i'm i see what you're saying and i'm guessing this has something to do with making sure that you're being consistent with your maybe color placement as you're going down yes okay yep i like that so let's throw that sample aside and you'll notice this piece is already loaded and ready to go and it's marked you can see we've got our lines here so what's the first step now we've got we so you only load the backing yes which makes sense because you're piecing on the frame so you load the backing next step is let's pick out some fabric so we're just going to dump some of these on hopefully it's not too much pressure on this fabric here oh i think we'll be able to make it work so underneath the scraps that you've got yeah kim i'm going to have you pick out ones first of all that you think oh that just doesn't go with this backing okay either or with the other fabrics okay i don't like this really dark can i just kind of get rid of that or oh put it in the basket i'll just go clean up after you christina always claims she's not my mom at work but i make her pick up after me anyway so i don't that i'm not loving that blue i do like that blue that not so much um i don't i don't want a solid let's do stuff with texture on it and generally i would just have like a basket of scraps at home like i have my green basket yeah and the scraps are all different sizes for this we have a lot of fat quarters but yeah i would just use whatever shape they are it doesn't matter whatever size big small get a variety and also a variety of the tones of the color we don't want to have like well i guess you could but not necessarily all darks not all lights yeah but have some balance there have some balance so so talking about balance here i want to look at this quilt that's behind us for a minute um you're talking about how you didn't cut any pieces to size so i mean i can see here you've got all different sizes in here different shapes this looks like a block that someone pieced kind of interestingly yeah i didn't piece it but it was gifted to me and they're such a pearly pink there's nothing i could do with them so i just threw these in there and can i tell you a little story on this quilt yeah the background my thinking through this quilt so on the back it's got this ah animal print cheetah or something cheetah leopard i wasn't a huge fan of the fabric yeah i think it came from my grandma maybe or somebody had gifted it to me right and it had been sitting on my shelf for a long time oh yeah so again i'm thinking oh i'm just going to make a really quick charity quilt yeah i'm going to pull out all my ugly fabric that i want to get rid of that's kind of in that color scheme i love it and then i ended up with this and my one daughter is like oh i want that quilt i know i'm like oh okay i thought i was getting rid of all my ugly stuff i love this quilt i think it's so fun yeah and it pulls everything kind of together it totally does it totally does and you used yeah just just all the techniques you're talking about but i do i do love just these these blocks that orphan blocks i mean it doesn't just have to be scrapped you could use orphan blocks you can use whatever to use this and i've done a lot of them that actually did have other orphan blocks in them and the orphan block sometimes is my inspiration rather than my backing ah so you know you can get really wild and crazy think outside the box i don't think outside the box well i love the idea of being able to use orphan scraps too okay i think i've got this let's get that one in there you're good yeah let's get rid of that one okay i think i think that's our stack we want to use um i love the idea of being able to use just whatever is available on this quilt yep and some pieces you might look at and be like oh i don't know if that really goes and in the end they might in the end they might not i know i mean i look at this quilt and some of those fabrics i think oh why did i put that in there or oh yeah it looks okay i think it looks great but the overall feel yeah it works it's fantastic okay okay so now we've picked out what we want to do with fabric we kind of match to our backing next is thread so you do you do kind of match your thread but you're going into your stash maybe finding that spool that you haven't used look at this one it's getting a little bit closer to the end so let's not use that one because you obviously use that one on a lot of quilts um i think this one a beige-y color i mean come on this has got color so let's not do that one do you are am i getting to pick your thread here maybe okay we'll see which one you pick because if it's the one i've already loaded on the machine yes i think i actually want to go with this [Laughter] it's like we planned it or something that's so great but yeah i think i think that this is a good color to go with it because it's just a nice kind of neutrally color it'll blend with everything yeah and that's a good point talking about it blending you might be doing one of these crazy scrappy quilts where you don't necessarily want the thread to blend you want that thread to show up i've done something on the space one yeah so i've done ones with variegated uh to be honest i try to use a like a non-specialty thread okay like i wouldn't do this with metallic or glitter because i'd probably have a mental breakdown yeah so you're talking like a good dirty sturdy workhorse thread like maybe a 40 or a 50 weight that because you are piecing this while you're quilting at the same time you want to make sure everything's going to stay together you want to be using like a 100 weight super fine stick and these aren't really show quilts right i don't know how they would do in a show never tried it but thanks for originality maybe maybe i should enter one so i i do these more for function okay um so i want a thread that's going to last for a long time okay in addition to my mental state while i'm stitching oh yeah yeah you just want to put that workhorse thread on and start stitching right yeah i do love specialty threads so let me just throw that out there but they all have their place and their purpose right right and you know if you really want to use some of those specialty threads in here because you have some you want to use up you could always go back and use that maybe just in the quilting rather than in the piecing process yeah okay okay so what's next so we've got our fabric picked out here so i usually go through my fabrics and i kind of pick out like let's put all the blues kind of together okay and then like maybe lighter greens yeah and then like the darker ones will get that lighter yeah and i just kind of sort them a little bit and then i throw them on the floor you throw them on the floor i throw them on for real i love it so in my studio i just leave like a whole pile back behind me i have my batting scraps back behind me and it's just like a tornado went through my sewing room okay but it all comes together okay i love it so so and you and you keep them separated out by color so you kind of have that okay okay okay so let me kind of talk about why i do that okay so remember how we've got these marks we know how many sections we need to fill right so let's say okay this pile is a little bit smaller than this pile right so as i'm putting my fabric on i might want to use a few more of these than the gotcha and you can engage that by the size of the pile i like it yeah i like it so that kind of helps me figure out which fabrics to use in each section okay okay so let's throw those on the floor all right let's do our piles i'm liking this i am liking this a lot okay okay so my backing is ready i've got it marked next step next step take our batting pieces okay and this is this is total you said batting scraps but i can tell this is like one that's been cut off the bottom of a quilt because it's a nice big wide we're not talking like little itty bitty pieces we're talking like the bigger pieces that you trim like when you trim a quilt at the end okay so i'm going to just kind of cover up that white line or sorry blue line that i drew yeah kind of make sure you're smoothing outside the lines so to say do i get to do the cut you gotta trim the batter and trim maybe about an inch outside of the line okay i can totally do that good old batting scissors and if you are one of those crazy people that doesn't have pieces of batting laying around you could use regular you could just float a bat yeah but like i said i'm all about using up rights all of the stuff that i have okay frugal quilter christie you know that would be me okay so now i've got my batting we're gonna start placing our fabric pieces so this is the piecing part yes okay i want to watch you do this okay so you've got your piles back here i'm going to grab this piece okay and like i said usually my scraps are you know just random shapes right and different sizes a lot of this fabric that we pulled out today is straight piece straight straight cuts it's not like totally random yeah funky triangles or dodecahedrons is that a word i don't know i mean mass geometry none of that stuff goes together well an interesting geometric shape let's talk about that so what we're talking about math yeah other than marking quarter half and three quarters no math is involved in this process i love that i love that so i've got a lighter green and i put it on a diagonal i like that you can place this any direction you want okay so if you did want to do straight across you can do it straight across you like to take the approach of we're going to be scrappy in our placement too we're going to have some fun with it yeah i love it i like to have that variety yeah i get a little bored with things sometimes yeah i can see i can totally see where having some fun with fabric placement here would make all the difference okay now that is a really big that's like a border right there so are you gonna use the whole thing i'm not okay i'm gonna check and see how much throat space i have here real quick okay making sure we know how far and i'm loaded in clear view so i can go to about this halfway mark okay that's perfect we'll move that back out of the way okay so batting scissors ah so you do keep your scissors handy that's your best friend when you're piecing here yes i love the batting scissors so what i would do is i would pick a place that i want to put this so let's say i'm going to cover up this selvedge end okay and i want to make sure that i have a lot of overlap overlapping remember on my first my inspiration quilt how i said that i had to do all that fixing because the seams had come up hold open i i'd rather be safe than sorry yeah so i'm going to do a lot of overlap on there and with the overlapping it's better to have the darker fabric on top of the lights yes i've learned that i wonder if we have any examples in this one this one's pretty that one i don't know but it's the same idea we always press to the dark side so that on the front of the quilt we're not seeing the shadow of that other fabric underneath it and i can totally see where that that logic follows here so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to place that on there and then um i'm going to just snip wherever i want awesome so i'm going to snip down here okay and then this will actually roll into the next frame okay and then i'm just going to put this back here in a already been used pile um you can do that or you can throw it or i put it back in the same pile because i'm eventually wanting to use all of it okay gotcha so but yeah you can do whatever you want no rules no rules okay let's put your blue in there okay let's yeah let's get a blue because we've got two shades of green oh wow this is a big piece yeah usually i would save this for something else but for purposes kim yeah put that wherever you want it to be um let's kind of go like that that would sound kind of bossy i apologize it's okay you're the boss of this quilt christina this is your quilt so be as bossy as you want i think i want to kind of do that okay i'm going to ask you a question before you cut do you want this part to show through you know what i think i do i think it'd be kind of fun to have that over there but then i'm thinking i want to cut it off maybe at about where the end of the or somewhere around where the batting is okay and do you want it maybe you want actually okay keep asking questions make me think about the design process okay so things to think about what angle do you want to cut it at yeah do you want it to end on you know a horizontal line i don't want it to be straight yeah maybe maybe if we cut and let's flip this little edge up here maybe if we go kind of like this do you feel so wild and crazy this is kind of fun okay and that way it's kind of peeking out underneath that green and we can lay some more over the top what do you think excellent um so some of these pieces we you know we could have ironed them yeah again going back to i'm a little bit lazy a lot of times i don't bother irony in the long run it's all going to work out if it's you know a huge crease or something yeah i will iron it some people get a little bit uncomfortable doing this though i believe it i believe that this would be i can think of some quilters i know very well that this they're just darn right now but i i actually really like this process it's kind of fun but you'll notice i'm not doing any basting no you're not if people are worried about that there is a great thing that you can do is spray-based you can always spray base yeah absolutely yeah just do it away from your machine yeah but you can just spray and then stick it down onto the batting and that will kind of hold it in place if you're having problems if you're worried about it shifting or anything but i can see how we're layering these pretty good over the top they kind of hold each other yeah okay let's get go ahead and just start picking fabrics grab this one and this one and i've got the scissors so we can kind of do a little if you need them okay and we're going to try to balance out colors like i don't want to put a light one right on top of this one but i need to get all the way up there so i'm going to do this i think i'm going to let this one kind of fall off the edge you need scissors sure okay and [Music] let's see i'm actually going to cut this one like this and leave a little piece because we're going to need some of these little i need a little piece here right there i'm going to need a little tiny one right here oh i didn't even actually i could probably shift that one down just to kind of shift this one up and that will cover up that area but still give me that overlap i need the overlap yeah you can see that kind of thinking i don't know christina you might have a better color sense of color than i do you know what actually i think i want to grab i'm not a big color person so this is it's a skill that i am working on we're always working striving to learn something new with each quilt that we do okay i like it okay so i'm putting down this lighter one and i'm gonna flip it underneath this darker one okay oh smart once again yeah yep okay so i think i need a blue yeah i think i think we need another blue maybe over there somewhere i don't like that one there you go this is me my quilts tend to live on the quilt on my uh design wall for like forever before i actually quilt in every time i walk by i like swap things okay you know what i'm going to do this one this one has a fun little weird cutout in it so i think i'm going to put it up here so that that weird little cutout will become part of it oh you know what maybe we should just put that right there oh that's perfect how's that that was meant to be that was meant to be and then i've got another square here i want to kind of put that on i have okay and you notice i am going off my side yeah overlapping that line that i had drawn see and i'm trying to go outside of the go off of the batting so that way i know for sure i'm going as far as i should excellent is that good that's perfect i'm going to sneak over here behind you i want some darker green i know i'm thinking oh that's the same as the one you've got i don't want that one you don't want that one great minds think alike right no totally gonna try this one okay oh i found another one that's got a funky little cutout in it i kind of like kind of like things like that i think those are kind of fun okay we need one across the top area there should we do this and that way we've got a fun little interest right there and i'll cut this one out here okay this is really fun i'm totally getting jazzed about going home and doing this in my own there's scissors for you we do a little bit yeah the blues are oh i grabbed one of those others um so we just need to fill up this first throat space and if you've got stuff that's hanging down it's just less stuff you have to think about for the next round right right so that's fine okay i kind of like that that mentality so you know what i'm actually gonna put this one like this okay christina you're gonna have a fun offend challenge here okay let's get just a little something there um is there like a little here's like a little a smaller piece okay except then that goes over my maybe we should cut that smaller what do you think oh i think it's fine you think that's good okay that's great so so we've got everything laid out now i love it so what we're going to do now is actually stitch everything into place okay so i like to go over all of the raw edges and just stitch it down also we're going to quilt throughout the entire thing as well okay so you can either stitch everything down first and then go back and quilt okay or you can actually do it all in one pass okay and sometimes i mix and match it just depends on what you're feeling like yes and the type of designs you want to quilt in here i mean you could do anything right yeah i usually do a stipple because again i'm just doing something that's fast and the quilting's not really what you're looking at right so let's go ahead and i'm going to i'm going to watch you here now i noticed that you have the glide foot on the machine the glide 2 foot and i'm assuming i mean it's totally the foot i would pick too it it it helps you so you won't catch all these funky edges and you'll be able to hold things down yeah anything else special you put on the machine nope special settings or anything um i usually do mine in cruise okay just because that's my personal preference there's no right or wrong absolutely um so i do cruise for this part i usually do a little bit faster speed so just whatever you're comfortable with and and are you going to like i know traditionally we always plumb line across the top of the quilt is that what you're going to do first i'm going to do a plumb line real quick across here so let's alan i didn't put it in basting but i could have right and i'm just going to smooth the fabric as i go along i didn't put channel locks on right i'm just bumping my machine up against my bar to keep it straight that's brilliant that's brilliant that's a great idea especially where we did load the entire throat space that's perfect okay i'm gonna peek over here okay see kind of where yep so that edge is my edge okay and things are gonna shift a little bit yeah don't worry it's fine yeah okay i'm gonna come straight down now you're just facing down the side that one i don't have my my friends okay but it's all going to be trimmed down at the end exactly we're just basting it i didn't put it in the basting stitch but like i said earlier that's fine you know i almost wonder if just doing this with a regular stitch is better because you really need to secure this fabric yeah i mean you're actually this is part of your piecing process so it makes sense it makes sense to me okay then you're going to base down your other side and then you're going to take off and start quilting i'm guessing yep okay i'm excited to see this process just a tip don't sew over your fingers yes ma'am i've heard horror stories this is i love what you're doing though because you are showing you just use your hand to stabilize you don't need to quilt super fast just use your hand to stabilize and hold that fabric where you need it while you're quilting yep okay okay so one of the reasons why i sometimes like to do the stipple meander is i can travel oh yeah because right now if i want to just start stitching i'd have to stitch all the way back up here then come across down and nobody got time for that yeah travel lines those are your friends okay so i'm just gonna wiggle over here until i get to my next fabric okay and then watch i'm gonna just stitch straight up and stitch it down and actually i want to grab this guy real quick while i'm here so you're not afraid to just like essentially backtrack a little no i love backtracking okay and you can you can do like a little wiggle stitch going on and off of the fabric a little bit okay the main thing is just try it and see see what works for you right so i'm gonna and the fabric you're using because i'm sure too depending on how many bias cuts you have in there all that other good stuff and you notice that one had a little bit of fullness um maybe when i come down here that out right yeah and it to be honest it really just adds to the feel of this quilt right okay i'm just gonna go all the way across down here i'm gonna come back [Music] let's see if i can oh i can't get that guy yet so we'll get him on the next on the next path the next pass and i just do whatever i can get to in that throat space okay have a little fun while you're folding this is like therapy for me oh i can totally see and you know i'm thinking about this and i'm going you know when i've had a day when i just need to sit down and quilt and be creative for a while this is like the perfect quote for it because there's no um there's no exactness here it's very free yeah no right or wrong at all on this right oh i want to get this guy i'm going to come back that's my throat space [Applause] we go back up there i almost feel like you're doing a maze trying to find the way out to the end yes maybe i'll have you do the next row oh i don't know i don't know casino this is your thing okay i'm getting a little bit of fullness here i'm just going to put a little pressure on the back side yep yep and it's i um let's move this back over here so i do like to um put my ruler base on right so i have a little bit of ah a place in there put your hand down put some pressure on it i like that that's a really good idea i know my ruler base tends to just live on my machine because you never know when you're going to want to pull a ruler out or do a technique where you need to have that place to put your hand also if you wiggle it helps ease in some of the fullness if you have some areas that are not laying perfectly flat maybe cut on the bias or something and that's going to happen okay looks like you i got one little spot i got one little spot there i love that you saw that maze completed i'm gonna snip this thread okay so that looks pretty good so that's step one now from here do you go ahead and do the quilting and the couching or what's your next what's your next step in the process because we've done if we look at your little marks here we've done this was a quarter and this was a half so we've we've done about half the quilt that you have marked for so at this point i i like to do everything in the throat space that's using this thread okay so i would go back and do my meander stitch okay or whatever stitch i want and if i had a place that had like a big huge section i could you know add a little motif or something in there you just mix things up practice a flower do a feather yeah throw in something fun so i'm going to go ahead and just double check make sure there aren't any areas that i did not get stitched down okay sometimes i'll have my kids come and check for me because i don't always see oh look i missed this whole shoot actually i didn't because that was my throat space so i went over there okay okay okay so i'm going to go ahead and stitch this out and then we'll go ahead and advance when we get to that point all right let's watch you do some [Music] quilting [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay wow christina that was awesome seeing so you just you just stippled everything there so we're ready to advance now so just normal advancing take your clamps off and we'll just advance real quick and then we'll show you the next step okay we've advanced we flipped all the fabric up out of the way so we can see the bottom of the batting and we're going to go ahead and lay down another batting scrap and oh look at that yeah and so ideally a little bit longer but yeah i just lay my batting right across there overlap a little bit if i need to perfect and then i lost my scissors i said i'm sorry i said i'm not up there there okay i was trying to be helpful oh you are okay so at this point we would just do that same step layer the fabric so we can pull these down that we're already on there lay them back down okay so i can see that this really is this is fine okay and now i picked some more fabrics so we can kind of do a little bit more layering here let's see i think we need a blue should we do a blue oh whoa that one has some really fun edges oh excellent i'm going to give you some fun challenges there christina it'll be great to see a quilt around that one and let's grab it are we gonna have enough to fill in that last little bit there i might need to just put a little one over the center part so we need a little piece right there let's do a light one um maybe that brown maybe yep i mean there's some right above it but i think that's okay this is a small project so i mean we're gonna have repeats close together anyway right oh look at that we gotta have our our little lovely scrappiness like truly this is a scrap quilt oh and why don't you hand me the scissors and i'll trim this edge over here so while you're trimming that i just want to point out that just a little tip before you advance the fabric it's nice to take a picture use your phone and take a picture and then that way you can go back and see where things had been placed and that can help you keep things balanced both the color yeah the size the direction you don't want to have one side just all of the fabric going the same direction right so that gives you kind of a little bit of a memory of what you've done what you've done yeah so we're going to go ahead and stitch this entire thing again and then we'll come back and i'll show you the next step okay awesome [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so it's all quilted down now you've got all the edges we've done all that amazing stippling what's the next step well you have a couple options at this point okay so everything's raw edge right so you can leave it as raw edge okay or we can couch over it and i'll show you a couple different ways that i do some couching okay and another option is to do what we call chenille it okay so there's a company that has that and i'll show you a sample of that one and just within a few more minutes yep at the end so i've pulled out some different yarns here they're different thicknesses so i actually decided i want to use this yarn and it's a little bit of a thicker yarn and so i've put on the largest couching foot so i've already swapped out the feet and we're ready to go um you can use variegated yarns so like this one or this one i think this color looks fabulous with this quilt oh yeah right there actually that's uh that's what you should have used on that uh outer space one yes that would have been fabulous yeah so it's just what look are you going for right right so yep um i've done a lot of my quilts using just you know your basic yarn acrylic and then some i've used this big fluffy this nice chenille chanel type this one's a wool so really you can use anything you probably just want to check and make sure if you're planning on laundering the quilt that the yarn would be something that could be washed and dried because you know you want it to be durable so if you look at this quilt i use the chenille yarn and again i use travel lines right so i will have multiple layers of yarn in one spot you can see that and this i just did in a straight line because it was that thicker yarn oh look i put a flower in here oh i love that so that's where you can practice some of those fun motifs yeah try new things um so you can do it in the straight line or you can do the didn't you have like a loopy shape that you did yeah okay so this loopy shape i found we were talking earlier about doing a zigzag and i found it was really kind of clunky okay trying to do that motion with the couching and it didn't always work out as nicely as i liked yeah so just experimenting i came up with my little loopy system so on the raw edge side i do my straight line and i loop around and loop around so i get that straight line going down the edge the raw edge and then i've got all this extra stitching holding that fabric in place reinforcing it yep exactly i see that and i love that because when you're quilting in a circular motion it's fluid it's easy it's smooth yep and it goes faster i love that i love that so this is this is quilting today i mean this is you you could do one you could knock one of these out absolutely yeah depending on what size it is yeah you can get cruising with this stuff okay so on the quilt behind you you'll notice that i didn't use the looping system i used a different yarn with a straight line but it's a big chunky yarn so but i wanted a little bit more character in it because i had some big blocks and so you'll see that i actually couched some of the stippling ah you did you did but you didn't do that in every block i don't see that so it's totally just using it for uh decorative purposes this is really funny you did like these little wavy lines and stuff yep i've got another one that i did like some circles that i couched on oh so it goes back to my saying of you know play with it yeah have fun yeah have fun okay especially because i don't know about you but when i put the couching foot on it's like i just can't turn my machine off it's so fun to stitch with the couching foot on okay so let's see you do some couching okay so i'm not going to go over a whole lot of the you know how do i get the yarn through my foot there are many other videos that we can watch for that but i am going to go ahead and i'll just start over here on this side once again working from left to right just like we normally do right i should say left correct let's see if i can get that yarn started with the couching that's always the once you get it pulled through that hole it's ready to just start having some fun and i'm just going to kind of puddle it a little bit i'm actually going to put you in charge of yep the yarn maintenance i'll be the yarn in my poinder minder okay not windows and i'm using the same thread that i had on before okay perfect yep and i'm just going to stitch straight line okay and look how nicely well you guys probably can't see i'll aim up this way and then you can see look how it covers up that raw edge yeah look at that i love that and i love that it gives that extra layer of texture too that's so fun and look i'm out of space so i'm just going to backtrack and that gives it another layer it also reinforces those edges because once again this isn't being pieced before it's really going to make this quilt durable yes [Music] so i'm going to actually travel sometimes i make up my own seam line yeah because we hit the bottom of our throat space there so now i'm going to do the loopies so i'm going to go up the right edge loop back around and this is a thicker yarn i don't normally do the loopy when it is a thick yarn i'm just going to loop around though and i love the idea of mixing the two techniques also there's there's nothing that says you should only do one no you can do whatever you want like i said there are no rules with this i just make things up as i go okay so i'm just going to go ahead and continue couching around and then maybe we can show them the chanel it [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so finished all the couching and now i get to take it off the frame right trim it up trim it up put up the binding on and it is done it's awesome start to finish i could even put the binding on on the long arm i was just going to say and that's that's something that i like to do i love to put especially for utility quilts a quilt that i'm actually going to use and it's going to get loved just put the binding on on the frame take it off trim it roll it run it through my domestic machine one time to stitch that down and it's finished so yep let's show one other quilt real quick quickly so you have taken this technique and applied it to a super popular type of quilt that people love to do the t-shirt quilt so this is a t-shirt quilt that i pieced on the long arm i love this so i'm not going to actually stitch out how to do it but i will walk you through some of my thought processes so i did not use stabilizer on most of these t-shirts which normally you would but yeah but i was here right right there was no you did this completely on the frame so you did the same process you loaded your back batting and then you just started laying out these t-shirts so with this though i did put a little bit more thought process into it i didn't just throw the fabric on the floor behind me i actually did cut all the t-shirts to the size i wanted and then i laid it the whole thing out okay and took a picture i'm all about taking pictures so that i can remember where things go and then as i came back to the long arm i again had my backing set up right i had markings so i knew where i needed to be right if it was getting too long i could shift them up a little bit or stretch them out right just to kind of keep it even there so i did the exact same process laid the fabric down stitched the raw edges did this one i did the stipple again over it but this one i came back and i put chenille it on chanel it okay so tell us what this chanel is i love chenille it because the more you wash it the softer it gets t-shirts are the same way and this quilt is so soft because you don't have any stabilizer in it i love it so this is chenille it just comes in a roll and so i used my square foot and i just stitched it on right stitched the next one and this one instead of stitching back and forth like i did with the couching i would actually cut the piece and then i could stitch back over okay to travel so i didn't have overlapping a whole lot and that way you don't have bunchy corners or anything like that you can totally see that and this this is so fun because it's just fabric that's cut on a bias like i think this is like a half inch one there's different sizes all different colors it's i think it's a great addition to this quilt just give it a little extra pop it totally does tied all the stuff together well christina this is amazing all right well thanks for watching today we have so enjoyed sharing this amazing technique with you be sure to like and subscribe to our channel and be sure to watch us next month and have fun quilting [Music] you

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 27,244

Rating: 4.8850574 out of 5

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

Id: TItev_w2YA0

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020