Quilting with an Embroidery Machine with Karen Charles

quilters newsletter TV the quilters community is brought to you by handi quilter designed by a quilter for quilters and Husqvarna Viking keeping the world sewing for over 140 years hi and welcome to quilters newsletter TV the quilters community I'm Mary Kate Karr Petrus and with me again is karen charles karen is an event specialist with Husqvarna Viking and she's here today to show us how to use an embroidery machine for machine quilting correct absolutely let's start looking at some of these samples that you brought here this is first of all let's start off with this beautiful whole cloth quilt this was the sample that I was working on just to experiment with how you could put a design together and keep it going there's no piecing in here in the center part and it's a great way to experiment to just take a 44 inch square fabric put your batting and you're backing together and then just start going for it put your designs in and see how they line up a great way it doesn't cost you hardly anything it's not a quilt in here that had all the piecing you might feel a little more emotional about it right sometimes it's nice to just be able to play and in the end I loved it so much I decided to add another piece to the edge so after I finished working on the turquoise I took another piece of the green laid it down stitched it flipped it and then kept going this could be a queen size quilt and I could keep working on it in this way my problem is I don't like to do anything more than once and I was well done with it by the time I got this far so I put a binding on it and called it a day well it's beautiful and it's a great example of just the power of a whole cloth quilt you just start off with a piece of fabric it is you can get something fabulous like this just by I love it and the nice thing is if you look at the back and I usually do use prints from the back because it's very forgiving the stitching looks nice and it adds to it it's not doing anything to take it away and your results on the back should look as nice as though they're quilting on the front but that's the goal at least absolutely that's always my goal this is an applique that I created in this software mm-hmm 60 premiere software and we've allocated that on I put it all together but this is a quilt design that's out here on the outside edge and it was a rectangle but because I was able to do it in rows I just kept going out and created in that space this is you know it's a real simple easy design to do but I think it looks really elegant and it doesn't take away from the fabric I really wanted the emphasis to be on the center applique and I think this the quilt design really worked with it to make this stitching did you use a heavier weight thread or is that a double stitch this is a double stitch and many designs are single stitch some are double stitch some have a combination of both depending upon it but this one was a double stitch okay that's how you get that nice really present right absolutely and you can see on the back I used another print but you'll see the design is there it kind of hides itself when you use a print so if you're just beginning doing free motion quilting or your quilting with an embroidery machine I'm I always use some kind of a print because I think it adds interest to what you're doing but you can also change your bobbin thread and the colors of it according to what you're working with if you're doing a white quilt with white background and you've got a darker border then you can afford to lighten up your color of your bobbin and you're not going to notice as much yes and I think that's really nice to get that let's take a look at this next sample this is again a very simple design these are embroidered designs that were created ahead of time and then the whole quilt was put together and the quilting was done afterwards and like most quotes that I do when I'm putting them together I well before I start doing the embroider quilt designs I will stitch in the ditch so everything looks nice and straight and square and then I get rid of all the pins I don't have to have any safety pins or straight pins and they don't interfere with hoops when I'm doing them and if you look at an example like this one this is a really pretty I think that's a gorgeous quilting design is and here in the outside corners I simplified a little bit by just taking the outside layers of it but because working with design positioning and I'm working with the hoos find a Viking designer diamond today I can go in and really make sure that everything's exactly where I want it to be placed same thing with the border design when I did it I was able to make sure that the design would come close to the border but not go over the border and that's important to me these samples here are quite small you know larger quilts would work just the same way and I have a sample where I've done the quilt design in the middle of a queen size quilt and it's gorgeous it just adds such dimension to it and I really love the way that it turned out it did it's beautiful so you were talking about the borders and how you get the borders nice and right up against your absolute inner borders like that so let's take a look at how you achieve that this is a quilt that we're going to be working with today and I'm going to do an embroidery design here which is a beautiful feather design but if I was going to start with working and a border there are special hoops that make it very easy to get your border lined up once you've put it in there it just locks down very simply and when I put my hoop on I can check and make sure where the design is going to be and that it's straight if it's not straight I can just clip it up like this and snap it back down again once the design is done I can lift it up move the hoop down and then I can lock it into place again and then because of the design positioning software it knows exactly what stop and start and in the in the many of the corner viking machines the embroidery machines the designer royale the ruby the topaz 50 all have design positioning what's lets you go in there and and be able to select a certain point and check and make sure the designs exactly where you want it to be so for today we're not going to be working on the border we're going to do a feather design in this square here and so I'm going to be hooping this up with the traditional hoop it usually is a little easier for me to pull the hoop toward me and let it hang up over the edge of the table while I'm doing it okay because it falls into place a little bit better and now I've got my hands to be able to manipulate things and the goal when you're whooping it up and getting it going is just trying to find some middle ground where you want it to be this is where I'm going to choose my place and I'm trying to get it in there relatively straight and to let you in on a little secret okay these squares are not square when I piece them I didn't do such a good job some of these are 7 inches some of them are six and seven-eighths and some of them are 6 and 3/4 and that's why it gets you know a little bit here but I'm not worried about it because I can solve that problem with the quilting if you weld it yes you can and the best part is when you're working with the designs you can resize them to be exactly so the design as it was created might be a 7 inch design and I'm gonna move this down a little bit more because I know I need to come down into that area the design might be a 7 inch design but I can make it be six and seven eighths board I can even unlock it and have the width of it wider than the height and you wouldn't even notice it when it was stitch down which i think it's a pretty incredible thing for those of us like myself who don't always do have any perfect okay we have our machine threaded up and normally when I'm working on a very intricate design like this I like the thread color to be tone-on-tone like the fabric that I'm working with for the sake of filming today we're using a very extreme darker blue so that you can see the stitching right and some people like that look yeah absolutely it's really there are no rules it's just what your the reference place and once I've got that done I am going to just slide it into the hoop make sure everything's here if this was a very large quilt like the green size quilt that I was talking about I would make sure that the weight of the quilt was on the table yes because that becomes very important if the the quilt is dragging on the floor it's going to affect the way the embroidery is working so by having the weight on a larger surface this is a great surface yeah you're working I would love to have this at home absolutely now to get our design up on the screen here's our design we're working with and it's a beautiful feathered design I was inspired by feather pillow this is a design that was done and I love it it's got a trip on toe area and everybody loves feathers but I am NOT good at doing feathers FreeMotion they're hard the reason why I started getting into using embroidery for quilting is because I can do the little kite stippling and I can do many different kind of meandering designs I'm not good at feathers I have no interest in developing that skill it's I love the look of it but it's never going to be perfect enough for me and that's why I like doing this type of thing with an embroidery machine we've got our design in the screen and we are going to go into our embroidery screen and it is a one color design so I'm gonna hide that we don't need to see it the screen is really nice and bright and I can zoom in as close as I want to to see where it's going to be but the first thing we're going to do is place it exactly so it's going to fit into that area because right now it's just come in in the center of the screen so I'm gonna go into design positioning and the same thing I'm going to start at the bottom left hand corner and put my marker stitch there and then I am going to move that point to where I want it to be the longer I keep my hand on it the faster it moves the other thing I could do would be to click and drag it up and once I know where it's gonna be inside here excuse my reaching okay I'm gonna move it to that corner and then I can check and see what another point is going to look like because I want to know what's going to fit in in all the areas so I'm going to check the top-left corner and I can see it's a little bit high now it could be that I don't have my fabric hoop tight enough and if it wasn't really going to fit what I could do is make the design smaller right like you were just talking about absolutely and then I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna check all four corners to make sure how it's going to fit into there so over here we're just about perfect you can see how tight I'm going to make this design it's filling the whole area it's not like I'm making it and it's going to be you know sitting in the middle of it floating I could do that but there'd be no challenge to that I'd like to make it be that small now at the end when I've done all this if I decided that I wanted to make it a little bit smaller I could go back out and change the size of it so this one is pretty much right on the money let's go back and touch the first one again and make sure that one's good and there it is and at some point if you know that it's just that little bit off just by snugging up your fabric you can solve just a bit any problem hmm and we're going to talk this was the only one that we had it was a little bit out and so there we are and we can see that it's in there just about perfect and so I'm just gonna hug it up there we go make sure my hooks all good and now we're gonna say okay and we're ready to stitch okay it's going to come to the first part and I'm going to press the start button it cuts the first thread and a quilt design is meant to go continuously without stopping and starting so you don't have a lot of jump stitches and there goes it's not amazing how it fits in there just perfectly does now I didn't if I was at home I might have taken another minute to check a couple of the parts and make sure that this area here you know that everything was really fitting in there but I'm trying to move things along you can be as careful as you want to be and if it's a real intricate design there's certain places where you can go in and check as many I could have said 16 different places on the line and make sure it was correct every place this is a design that I got out of a 5 D quilt design creator it was an artwork that was turned into an embroidery and then I put it onto a USB stick and put it into the solution if I wanted to I could have also sends it directly to the machine from the computer but I usually like to have that hard copy on the USB stick because if I you know I can always go back to the computer but it's nice to have something separate like that it's not a gorgeous design really is I think you're right that color is actually turning out pretty well there we are the designs done and we can take it out and I will run hoop it quickly so you can see it on them now we've got this other difficult shape of a triangle here and remember if this was me doing it I would have used a letter color thread that shows that really strong that's a look you want that's good but I am much more forgiving to myself so I tend to match my thread color closer to my fabrics but for this triangle design it's made up of actually four designs right here right so in the software I could go in and isolate that and you'll see it's smaller than the triangle but I can go in and enlarge it make it higher and wider till it fit the space the way that I wanted it because you can adjust the measurements in the machine absolutely customize it and I can change it so it'll change the stitch count or not change the stitch count according to what I need that's great well thank you so much for coming well and showing us how you can use much fun embroidery machine to achieve be really gorgeous beautiful machine quilting results thanks so much for joining us and we hope to see you next time bye bye thanks quilters newsletter TV the quilt community is brought to you by handi quilter designed by a quilter for quilters and Husqvarna Viking keeping the world sewing for over 140 years

Channel: Quilting Daily

Views: 64,442

Keywords: Quilting with an embroidery machine, perfect quilting, how to quilt with an embroidery machine, Karen Charles, Husqvarna Viking, Mary Kate Karr-Petras, QN TV, Quilters Newsletter TV, Quilters Newsletter Community, Quilters Newsletter TV: The Quilters Community

Id: WRmeVQEwUUw

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 27 2014