Stabilize, Straighten, and Stitch – HQ Live June 2018

hi I'm Vicky hot welcome to HQ live you know there's a topic that we get asked so many times and that is how do i straight my cute quilts how do I keep my quilt straight how do I get my leaders straight well in the past we have done a couple of HQ lives that have been so popular that we wanted to bring them back and help you understand how to get that quilt square and keep everything square okay so that you will have the perfect quilt in the end we are going to air re air one of our HQ lives that we have done in the past with Kimmie Brunner we will be here with you today answering your questions helping you if there's anything that she doesn't address and we will be here for you then one thing that I want to encourage you to go to is our YouTube channel in March of 2016 there is another HQ live that Kimmy did so that you can once you've watched this you can go and follow that and get more information so let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Vicky ha from handi quilter and today I have Kimmy Bruner with me yeah and Kimmy a while back you did a webinar on straightening your quilt loading it and there were a lot of questions and so yeah we invited you back to answer the question so I'm gonna turn this over to you and then I just want to ask questions along the way yes please do so it's your show yay as Vicki said recently we did a webinar and a lot of people had questions about the stabilization process of working through the quilt the webinar discussed keeping your leaders straight and loading your quilt so that it would be straight and then I referenced doing stabilization work while quilting and a lot of people were kind of lost on what is stabilization work so today we'll talk about stabilizing your quilt kind of some tips and tricks that you can use to make your quilt turn out a little bit better and you can always get it better on a video so that's rather than sending you pictures and you know doing something like that and a PowerPoint just seeing that real life yes so important exactly and being able to ask questions and get get in there with the camera and say do this don't ya okay so where do we start all right as you can see I've already got my backing and my batting loaded on so I see you have some tube and grip similar to leader grip or red snapper the way you loaded it onto your top mm-hmm you know to the take-up poll and I'm assuming on to the back you know yes and that's only for your back you know it's only for my backing yeah I used the rod and grip system a little bit differently I don't load my quilt tops onto the machine using the the rod and grip system simply because if I have any fullness at all in my quilts border I can't use that in using the rod and grip you just have to kind of lay it into place with those and snap the the clamps down you don't have any wiggle room like you do when you pin when you're pinning if you have any excess fulness in your border you can ease that in as you go you can make your quilt be the correct width without creating the pleats that you would get if you just laid that far down on the rod and snapped in it and I'm not very good at kicking them straight no no okay so so now when I'm loading my quilt top I'm always gonna pin the bottom of my quilt onto its leader and roll it up out of the way simply because that's like having another set of hands coming in and holding on to the bottom of your quilt so you're not a floater you're not done now you don't float this and just let it hang down no the only time that I would do that is if it were a small quilt that I pieced and I know I was really really careful and I got it really straight and I have you did she know what you absolutely okay or if I'm working for customers and I'm working with someone who I know is very meticulous and they're piecing and I know darn well her quilt is gonna lay really flat otherwise I want to pin the bottom of my quilt top onto its leader roll it up out of the way baste my the top of my quilt into place and then I've got that extra set of hands holding everything nice and flat so that all I have to do is worry about quilting it and it's out of the way so the cat haircut doesn't get on and I don't snag it with a pin or step on it or yeah I'm a believer in not floating ipn everything except for like the small something that would be in the throw space yes absolutely I like that stability absolutely it is I just find that I get better results I know that some people get great results floating and if they if they get good results they should continue to do so but I get better results when I don't yeah did I find that too but before I load this quilt top onto the machine I want to do some detective work because the whole purpose of the detective work is finding out if I've got problems with this quilt before I load it I do not want any unpleasant surprises when my quilt is on the frame okay once your quilt is on the frame and you haven't figured out what you might have with this quilt it's all gonna be guesswork and conjecture all you can see is this much quilt in front of you if you start seeing some fullness you don't know is that fullness gonna get worse is it gonna get better what's gonna happen with this quilt I want to look at the quilt before I load it and I want to know what I'm dealing with before I sew if I have a lone star quilt that has that big swell right in the center where all those points come we know we've have some issues you don't have to work with exactly oh my god order yeah or wonky corners or if I'm working on a sampler quilt and it's got 12 blocks and 11 of the blocks are awesome and one block is awful I want to know about that awful block so if you were a quilting for a customer she brings your quilt and it had her quilt to you and it has some of dog-ear corners or what wavy borders or things that maybe she could correct would you correct him or would you send it back home to her I would you did for her some options I would tell her maybe she should not have pieced the extra seven inches into the border maybe it would have been better if she cut it to shape I'll give her the options I can fix that for you and I will charge you X amount of money because remember if you're working on her quilt she's paying you otherwise you work on your own stuff or I will give her the option of sending at home and she can fix it herself but when I do this I want to be really careful about how I do it I don't want to crush her spirit I'm not telling her her quilt is stupid and so is she I'm just telling her that we have a little problem and here's how we're gonna fix it and if especially if it's a brand-new quilter I'm gonna be I'm gonna walk on eggshells when I explain this to her and if it's a brand-new quilter and it's her first quilt I I'm a softie so I might just fix it for her so that she gets good herself so if you fix it for her will you show her how absolutely so she's old yeah okay good idea and I will show her how much better I will present it to her in a way that I'm showing her how much happier she'll be with her quilt and how much better her quilt will look rather than oh this is wrong and you did it all wrong you're such a peacemaker you have to be nice so the detective work that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start by measuring the quilt and I'm gonna measure it a couple of times through the center because I want to know how wide is this quilt really I don't care what the pattern said that it should the well that should be okay I want to know how wide my quilt is the pattern designer probably has a different seam allowance than I have she probably pieces differently than I guess she probably irons differently than I pressed my I use a lot of starch and I press carefully maybe she's more aggressive with her pressing than I am so her measurements are probably gonna be different so I don't care what her pattern says the quilt should be width wise I'm gonna measure through the center a couple times and see how big the quilt is why the center why not the outside it I was just gonna get to that oh sorry that's okay those under when I get to the outside I'm not gonna just measure like right through here along that top stop border okay I'm gonna measure the edges of my quilt because the edge of that border is what I'm going to pin to my leader I want to know what I'm pinning to my leader so if she let's say this was the top order and there was a little bit of fullness she may have eased that fullness in when she stitched this seam but there's nothing easing the fullness in up here so I want to know how wide is this piece of fabric that I'm going to pin on to this leader so I'm gonna measure right along the edge and I'm gonna be over through the mid find that that outside edge is usually always wider than the center if there's a problem with fullness and the border yeah you're gonna see it in the edge right away okay and the easiest way to see especially if you have a customer that you're working with the easiest way to show both of you you and her if there is fullness is bring the bottom border up to the center of the quilt lay it in place and smooth if the border is too big it's gonna extend off the center do the same thing by folding the top of the quilt down to the middle and see if there's extra fabric okay that way if she's standing right with you she can see my borders too big and now I know what Kim's talking about when she says we're gonna have to ease in fullness so back to the detective work I'm gonna do my measuring if I have several different dimensions for example this is supposed to be a 90 inch quilt let's say the outside border is ninety one the center the smallest measurement that I take is eighty nine and a half and maybe the bottom border is 92 I need to ease that 91 and that 92 into eighty nine and a half because I can't stretch that eighty nine and a half out to 92 inches you can't stretch your fabric that's an inch and a half yeah that's a lot of it that's a lot of stretching and it may look like it's staying put while you're working on the machine but as soon as you take it off the machine it's gonna just suck up and take off so the stitching's not gonna hold it out no of course you're stitching usually helps draw it in yes exactly so you'll be able to easily ease in excess where you can't start out okay so if the top of this was ninety two the bottom of it was eighty nine and a half would you put the widest at the top or at the bottom or do ya if I know that one end is worse than the other I want to do that first I want to defeat that that problem first so I'm gonna load the worst end first okay and that way the whole rest of things like ooh we're getting towards the end it's way better now so I don't want to save the worst for last because then you're dreading it the whole time you're working on the quilt just fix it oh really yeah absolutely all right the other thing I'm gonna be looking is which way are my seam allowances pressed especially out in the borders mm-hm if my on this quilt sorry on this quilt that I've got this little black and white stop border and a white outer border I want to know where those seam allowances are going because if my seam allowances are pressed to the outer border I'm gonna want to float my border design you from the edge just a little bit because when my seam allowances are pressed out you've got a little bit of extra bulk right in there okay if you stitch this line in the ditch and you bring your border design right up to that stitch in the ditch line sometimes you know how you get that little crease over the marker in there yes it's because you've got a couple extra inches or a couple extra layers of fabric laying right up next to that stitches line so I want to know where my seam makes it shift into it yep so if my seam allowances are pressed into that stop border I can bring my border design right up to the stitch in the ditch line and not worry about any oh good any bunching any puckering anything like that I also want to look for stray threads because with this little black and white border I don't want black threads lie under my white fabric I want nice clean white threads I'm gonna look behind the blocks because I want to know how the seam allowances are looking back there do they look punchy do they look messy or do they look nice and flat if there's a bunch II mess where a whole bunch of seams come together I want to know that ahead of time so that maybe I'm not trying to stitch right into that bunchy mask okay I keep my stitching out a little bit or maybe I'm gonna see that wow this is gonna give me a lot of fullness I better get in there and nail it down with some stitching so moral of the story is I want to get in there and have a look to see what I've got in this quote before I start loading it does that make sense it does I just worry about that quilter that decides to make this one really flattened this one has a bunch on it you know yeah and that's inconsistent the different work if you've got one that's a train wreck you have to treat them all like they're a train wreck you don't want to if you get four blocks one of them as a mess you don't quote three of them one way and quote the fourth one differently you quote them all as if they were a mess so that they all are consistent when they come off there are consistent Meza absolutely if it's gonna be a mess make it really really messy okay one more thing as you can see I've got white nice crisp white batting I've got a nice crisp white quilt top so it's gonna be nice crisp white yep I want it to be white if you have a white quilt you want to keep it that way so you want to think about things like what color will your backing fabric be because if you look at this already stitched example I've got a lime-green backing fabric and if you look closely you can see in my heavily quilted areas I've got a lime-green shadows I can see it yeah so if you want a white quilt when you're done think about what color backing you're going to use and think about what color batting you're going to use you want it all to work together to keep your white quilt weight so think ahead and don't have any unpleasant surprises later so any questions about all that detective work and all that I love yeah I think this is great it's a like two minute process of you go and trim her threads if she's got some lots of black threads yep yeah because you know that she's gonna think that she pressed it perfectly and I made those threads appear so on a little mess like this I'm gonna get in there and just snip those black threads away and okay really really okay the way that I want it to look before I ever start stitching because otherwise you need to try and get in there with a little tiny crochet hook and pull those runs out it's way easier to trim it before you load it so do you starch your quilt top before you built it I starts my fabric before I'd piece it and that helps me increase my accuracy and it helps me get a flatter but you don't do another starch at the end know what that do know because I had a good press yeah I've carefully starts to carefully pieced I've carefully pressed so it's gonna hand up okay pretty pretty flat and I use a liquid starch a good old-fashioned liquid starts like grandma used I mix it either three to one or four to one so four parts water to one part okay starts or three parts I'll just spray it on and then just spritz it on if I have a really flimsy fabric I'll do the three to one a bit stronger starts mix if it's just a good quality quilt shop fabric four to one so the other night we were talking about the way you starch and you mentioned that you start on the back side of the hmm and you starts at first mm-hmm yeah I lay my fabric down on my pressing surface I have great big wide pressing surface lay it down face down right side down mm-hmm I start to the back I let it soak in for maybe two minutes I flip the fabric over and I press from the front because the heat of the iron brings the brings that starts up through the fabric so you get a crisper starts so you starts the back but you don't press the back right um that also helps cut the flaking because I hate like when you spritz turns and then like if you're using like this quilt behind us if I were to spray starch on the right side I'd have a little white flakes out over my okay so you will have the flaking but it'll be on the wrong side be on the back and nobody'll ever see it so oh what a great tip yeah don't put it on the top or you'll be sorry later so any questions before I started pinning on no I'm I'm excited to see the next step awesome let's get this pin right okay as you can see we pinned on the bottom of my quilt top onto its leader we eased in any fullness that we may have need to need it to ease in and we discussed how to do that in the straighten up webinars okay woodies how you would place your marks or place your pins so that you know where your corners belong and so measure out so far from the center and yep match the center of your quilt border to that center pin match the corner to this pin match the other owners work up between if you've got fullness you don't shove it all to the end and try and ease it all in in the last three inches and ease it in equally as you sew maybe find equal parts and then just ease that that's just like you would a gathering the sleeve absolutely yeah and that you only need to do that if you've got really a lot of fullness like if this was really a poorly pieced quilt and you've got just a lot of fullness that you're trying to ease then you may wish to subdivide the border into others or even eighths or send it back to the quilt or send it back to the quilter yep and if you have to subdivide the border remember you want to place corresponding pins on the leader so that you have a pan your border to match up to locate on your leaders so that everything everything is going to be evenly easy you don't want to have a whole bunch of fullness just shoved into one spot you want it to be okay evenly as we said earlier evenly a trainwreck make it all the trade Mecca that's good so now we're going to based a straight line that is going to attach the batting to the backing and give me a nice straight line to line up like okay top - so is there a reason I noticed you know that you have this attached with the tube and/or the rod and the channel and so there's a lot of extra bat or backing fabric do you always bring it or do you have your human chance yeah I usually have that down here but I have this is like way more backing than I need it oh I thought it would be more attractive on camera if I just wrote but normally you'd be a little bit more not not so generous with your bad self donors but that's a great question I'm gonna be working on this quote up with templates in my border and I want to make sure that my clamps are way far away from the edges of my border I don't want to have clamps right up next to where I'm trying to because then I'm trying to balance a template on top of a clamp or I'm trying to work around in the ruler base it's in and I don't okay so you're okay with allowing a lot of extra fabric yeah just for the ease of quilting yes I'm right using rulers I'll have maybe two to three extra inches on both sides two inches or three inches over here two or three over here okay when I'm using templates I want four to six I want those clamps way out of the way it's it may seem like a waste of fabric but it's easier I would prefer to waste that fabric and know that I'm not gonna be crashing into any clamps or or messing with my rulers okay so just questions along the way here absolutely I'm going to be using the electronic channel locks the electromagnetic channels are genetic welter yes if you don't have a pro stitcher this is the most awesome awesome thing - have you added to your machine and it fits all of our frames or all of our machines yep and it couldn't be easier to use you just bring up your bobbin thread you just turn it to the little switch mm-hmm - lines is the horizontal lock one line is the vertical lock and then you just hit go and your machine can't do anything but move from side to side or from front so you're squaring this straight up at the frame wait up absolutely straight up and I'm just basting down my daddy [Applause] the way over there don't want to run you over when you get to the other end pull up your bobbin thread and then don't forget to turn your channel lock off so the zero in the center of the channel lock and off yeah so I'm gonna just show this I can turn this over and see the one line is vertical so forward and back the zero unlocks both and the two line is horizontal yes and that's GZ and I like to take it and actually just hold it in my hand if I'm doing like piano keys I'll hold it in my hand I'll just go back and forth okay smart all right so we have that straight line across it's like paying on wall paper plumb line right yes one perfect line to line up everything so you stitch on your batting first hmm and I'm going to grab my measuring tape I'm gonna measure this border so you can see how I do this this is 27 inches wide so I'm gonna divide that in half I thought I would grab me the pin cushion because I just you want me to get the calculator yeah I can do that math that's not that hard so 1/2 of 27 is 13 and a half inches thank you I'm going to pop a pin right down in the center of there so how do you know that that's the center I can see where the center of my leader is in the center oh because of the poles that are right there there's a lokay so if you couldn't see that what would you do I would have I I would have figured out ahead of time where the center of blade you do some type of a ruler from the center mm-hmm that or normally as we just talked about usually if I were doing this at home I would still have some of my leader in the work obviously so yeah I would see my center mark okay just a couple of inches of my work just trying to figure out every every step of the way so now I'm gonna measure out 13 and 1/2 inch is pin and I'm gonna measure out 27 and there's a pin just poking a pin down yep that was that I was doing that's it okay the pin is telling me where to go all right and now I'm going to lay my quilt top in place right along the edge of that right along that seam or that basted line like do you baste or do you use do you change it to a basting stitch normally I base but you can do it at 10 stitches per inch it doesn't matter all you're doing is nailing this into place about an eighth of an inch in from the edge of the quilt because you want this basting line to be swallowed up in your binding see now you don't want to have to come in later and mess with now are you gonna pin this down or just hold it like it is nope with a nice flat batting like this it's gonna stay put all by itself okay if I had a fluffy like a high loft Polly bet I would use my glide foot and I would I would maybe drop a couple of pins in just so that is not shelter and once again I'm going to set my channel lock by lining up on the inside of my hoppin foot I'm gonna line up the edge of this fabric with the inside okay I think okay so I know I'm only about an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the quilt drop my needle set my channel up bring my thread up and I'm going to just the edge of my quilt into place okay so then you can hold that and adjust that yep and if you have any fullness that you need to ease in you can walk your fingers behind your hopping foot and just gently tug and smooth and it gently moves the phone case let's see that let's see that on camera as you walk that walk behind head as I all right gently tugging so it keeps that fullness out and you didn't want to get those pins out of the way yeah don't be stitching over pins or won't you be surprised when you hit one and this one's pretty flat I don't wanna step in I'm just gonna smooth it out of the way all the way to the end step back here let you get his job done hit me in the run younger so you want that corner right up to that line mm-hmm and I see you do a little back stitch there yeah I don't want shifting I just want this part and once again remember to turn off your channel lock now you can move your machine in any direction if you don't turn turn off your channel lock you're gonna start trying to do stuff and you're not gonna be able to do much at all because you're which means nothing so if you don't have the electromagnetic channel like we do have the channel lock the plastic c-clamp channel lock so you can put on your nut clamps but plastic little it would like little clamps loose eclairs now I'm going to roll up my quilt talk i hands I just like oh dad touch my white but no everything is nailed down it's pinned on or basted on at the way that it is supposed to be at the top mm-hmm so how am I going to keep all of this from empty yeah I will show you excited so Kimmy I see that you have advanced this forward a little bit so that we have some throat space to attach you know just stitch down the sides I'm assuming you're gonna do that but I have a question what about quilts that have uneven edges like double wedding ring or scallops or zigzag type things how do you how do you line those up and square them up every quilt is gonna have some straight lines you just have to sometimes look a little bit harder to find where your straight line is that you're going to line up let me show you an example on this double wedding ring table I don't see any straight lines yeah when you look at this you just see these curves and these little points and it's like well why do i line up here but if you look right through here but there's a straight line from me this one to this point there's a straight line across this melon and a straight line from this point straight line across this melon yeah so you could fold this down to a straight line right along those lines that we just talked about we're gonna reach over here and grab this and let's say this is just the top because obviously this is already pieced you would line up that straight folded line against your basted line get it all nice and flat and remember if you're gonna do this when you are basting your batting to your backing you need to make sure that you leave enough room for this to go the excess so here would maybe be the top edge of your batting and your basting line would be down a couple of inches and it would be a real basting then because you'd be taking it out yeah you'd have to pull it out okay obviously the part of the basting that is inside the quilt could stay you would want to make sure that it's going to be a thread that's not going to shadow through but the basting thread on the back of the quote you could just pull out later okay so you'd line up that folded line with your basted line carefully line it up into place lay these scallops back and baste once again right along that straight line to hold it in place okay then come back in and baste up and over the rings and up and over the ring listen now your quilt is straight even though your quilt didn't look like it had anything straight to line up yeah okay that make sense yes Holly yeah a little bit more preparation but in the end it's gonna work out because you took the time yes bear nice straight to square quilt even though it doesn't have any straight edges okay so next step is gonna be I want to make sure that my top two corners are nice and square I do not want to start working down this quilt and leave myself dog-eared funky-looking corners at the top if you can get your edges straight in your corners square everything else on the rest of the quote looks better because the outside looks better so the first thing that I'm gonna grab is just a rotary cutting ruler Oh rotary cutting rulers have nice long lines and they're nice and straight you can line everything up with a nice long line I'm gonna lay this down on my corners and I'm going to line up the top edge of my quilt with this nice long straight line and I'm gonna line up the side of my quilt with this nice straight line and I see it you don't have to tug time okay they do the same thing over on this side would you place a pin here once you got it in or just I would baste it once I got I'll do that in just a cell okay I'm gonna make sure that this I cuz when I tucked over here I want to make sure I didn't okay can I should I hold this or let you just go back and check it one more time that's good yeah it didn't shift it all it stayed put and that one's good mm-hmm this one's fun okay so the next thing I'm gonna do just bring my machine over and I showed how to baste that top line using the channel locks after those viewers who don't have a channel lock I'll just so you know okay got it once again we'll just bring up that bottom thread bump my stitches per inch down to about six okay and I'm just going to carefully just walk that down there and when I checked that corner I want to make sure that it's coming straight down from that corner and we won't waste time doing that on the road when we're filming but at home I would have checked to make sure that I've got a straight edge coming okay towards my belly bar on both ends and then paste it into place I'm gonna do the same thing on the other side basting those sides in so you'll do the whole throat space of that okay right till I run into the belly bar and I'm out a room and I can't go any further okay and now my whole every this throat space is square yes everything in front of me is nice and square I don't have to worry about straightening those sides out they are straight my corners are square so I noticed you didn't put the clamps on before you did that nope because if you clamp your backing fabric before you have basted your top fabric to your backing fabric making it all over one unit you will be applying unequal pressure I'm sorry unequal tension to the backing and the top fabrics and if you based your backing fabric and your top fabric is not stitched down you're gonna have looser top fabric tighter backing fabric when you take the quilt off the frame because the backing fabric was tighter it's going to pull your oak top to the back and you're gonna have edges that curl around to the back if your top fabric is tighter than your backing fabric when you take it off the frame it's going to shrink up and it's gonna pull those that the backing right up with it and curl it on to the do you put your clamps on your backing and your baddie yep well if my backing or my batting is wide enough to be hanging over the edges yeah and then I just clamp those too but I don't clamp the quilt top okay they just clamp whatever is hanging off the edges okay what's next well we've basted the top into place we've basted the sides down we made sure that those corners were straight and then we put our clamps on okay I mean we wanted to make sure that everything was equally tight but not too tight we don't want to turn it into a trample so I don't have this pulled really tight here and I noticed you've loosened this so that it doesn't bounce it's just laying on the bed of the yes the biggest mistake that people make and I think often times beginners have this problem is they over tighten their quilt sandwich and then they start having skip stitches and it just you will get much better results if you don't have it it's so tight I like to be able to reach up under the quilt with one finger poke it up from underneath the quilt and grab the tip of my finger I don't want to bounce quarters off of the quilt you only need to hold it straight or tight enough so that you don't get puckers you don't need to have the quilt screaming for mercy it just needs to be tight enough so that it doesn't pucker well I know when some quilters have it so tight and whether they tighten the take-up pole or the two back pulse here when they tighten them so tight the fabric is bouncing so that you can't even see the stitching really yes absolutely and the tighter it is the more balance you get and especially if you've perhaps you're working with stencils and you've marked some chalk lines and if it starts bouncing you get what I call pounce bounce your mount the chalk just goes all over the place and then you can't see where the marks are actually supposed to be because they've bounced so much and they kind of get shadowy instead of okay clear yeah sorry good tip I want it to be just a little bit loose not so loose that it's a great big giant hammock and not so tight that it's screaming at me to please lose yeah so okay no trampolines yeah absolutely so the next thing that I'm gonna do is if you look at this quilt I've got this white border I've got this white interior and I've got a really obvious very boldly contrasting stock mortar this line needs to be straight because it is so visible and if it's not straight it's gonna stick out like a sore thumb and so is this line okay so are these lines so my first order of business is gonna be get those lines straight before I start doing any stitching in the border or in the interior stabilizer and the reason that you want to straighten those lines before you start doing any of your motif work or design work is that if you need to tug a little bit or ease a little bit and you've already stitched your border design you have no wiggle room you've left yourself no wiggle room at all so you stitch the line first if you're going to do custom work and if you're gonna stitch in the ditch if you're just say doing an edge to edge piece you're not going to stitch in the ditch obviously because you're just doing the edge to edge but you still want to straighten it yeah so you have fiddle with it you make sure that it's straight you've manipulated into place and then you begin stitch well if I've stitched across the top here won't this be straight not necessarily it depends on how it was pieced and how it rose press okay because it this can be perfectly straight on the outside but if this was pieced poorly or pressed okay maybe a little bit overly aggressively at one end and not quite so much at the other end it could be really wobbly okay so first thing I'm gonna do is once again I've got that rotary ruler that works so well on my outside corners I'm gonna do the same thing that I did on the outside on these corners okay in a line up this long line along this seam line I'm gonna line up one of these lines on this seam line and I'm just gonna make sure that I've got a nice sharp square corner okay some straight lines and I'm gonna do the same thing over here make sure that that looks nice and straight good job looks pretty good yeah so once I know that it's straight I can start stitching and if I lay those lines down and it's not straight I may need to get in there and talk a little bit or ease a little bit I mean need to manipulate it just a little bit with my hands to get everything way more so it was really bad would you maybe manipulate it and then PM yes absolutely yes this day is put a shift out of place okay where I want to come back in and start stitching so now I've used my rotary cutting ruler as a kind of a general straightener but now I want to use my straight ruler as kind of a fine-tuning tool as I'm stitching so your long arm ruler that's thicker yes my longer motor that is a minimum quarter of an inch okay any thinner than that it's gonna slip under my hopping foot and cause all kinds of damage so I'm just going to bring my machine over start my stitching line right in that corner bring up my bobbin thread a couple of tiny little stitches and I'm going to position my straight ruler so that it's a quarter of an inch in from the seam line that I'm about to stage and because the edge of this ruler is straight it's going to show me if my seam line is okay I'm gonna see right away if that seam line is doing a sway beam thing and if it let's say it's bulging out this way I'm gonna use my fingers to kind of pull it in okay this direction if it's dipping down so that it's gonna be a shy of where it ought to be I'm gonna come on this side and I'm just gonna tug it so this is a very slow process I noticed you notice you've got that little grips here to hold the sandpaper grips to hold it so it doesn't slide yes the things that you need to keep in mind when you're using a ruler whether it's stitching in the ditch or stitching out a design you need to have something helping stabilize it you need to have your extended base obviously you're not ever gonna use rulers your extended base and you are going to only stitch on the portion of the ruler that your hand is on anything that is out past your hand isn't stabilized so I'm only going to stitch where my hand is I'm gonna stop and reposition my hand or reposition the ruler so when the hopping foot gets over to here where this finger yes you're done I'm done stop yeah and sure either reposition or shift your hand mm-hmm okay absolutely I am NOT if my hand is here I have no business do you walk along as you're stitching or do you stop I want to stop but because I can walk well I'll walk a little bit but only a little bit because when you're walking when you're walking your fingers along you're kind of moving the template a little bit I don't want the template moving yeah I'm stashing I if my needles going up and down I want my template staying put I don't want my template go and you're stitching on the down side of the scene hmm yes my my seam allowances are pressed underneath this little stop corner so I'm I'm stitching on the low side at the seam your stitches will disappear much more easily if you're on the low side and I'm also using a flat thread and what I mean by that is not a thread with a shiny finish because that way if I'm stitching in the ditch and I wobble out of the ditch a little bit I don't want a shiny wobble I want a wobble that just kind of disappears just like the fabric this is not real shiny yeah so I'm gonna use either a cotton thread or polyester thread with that cotton okay so tell me what stitches per inch you use I like to use ten stitches per inch simply because if I make a mistake ten stitches per inch is easier to rip out than 12 stitches or 18 stitches per inch okay I'm kind of picky about my stitches per inch or I'm sorry about my stitch in the ditch I want it to be really accurate a ditch and I mean I'm not insane about it but if it wobbles too far out I'm gonna pick it yeah and I checked your quilt since she's pretty particular so it's pretty particular I know some people use a twelve or fourteen because there are little tiny short stitches and if you do wobble it maybe it doesn't look so out of the ditch yeah it sinks into you but if you have to unpick or rip out yeah yes a lot of stitches per inch to be ripping out so when I'm doing stitch in the ditch or when I'm doing template work any work that has to be really precise or it's gonna bug me I will choose a stitch length that's easier to rip okay just makes my baby alright I want to watch you stitch in the ditch alright so what I'm gonna be thinking about when I'm using a template either to stitch in the ditch or any other kind of template work I'm not shoving the template up against my or I'm not shoving the hopping foot up against the template if you do that if you really shove you're hopping foot first thing you do is you push your template out of the line so I want to instead just slide and glide nice and gently as long as you keep contact between you're hopping foot and the ruler the ruler is gonna keep you on track so you don't need to shove it up against so another thing I've noticed is that you don't have this all the way up the top by the nose I went it close to me closed yeah just like me okay I want I'm gonna see what I'm doing and I have the greatest amount of control when my work space is no more than 15 maybe a 10 it's just inches away from me I want this you're only about eight inches away yeah I want to want to be able to lean over and see what I'm doing I must stay on top of it I don't want to be reaching wait okay I said you're not tall enough you want to give me a leg up so you're like placing every stitch individually this is a slow process very slow now I'm coming up to where I can see that my seam line is kind of blurring out a little okay I'm just gonna tug a little herb thing huh I'm bluffing and I'm gonna tug just a little bit so you're in precision do you like precision over crews I always use precision when I'm working with templates I do not want the machine to be taking any stitches that I don't want it okay so precision because it stops when I stop crews does not stop when I stop yeah you are getting those oh my goodness and I'm gonna stop reposition check that seam in relation to my nice straight ruler edge I'm just gonna lean over and let's all get our noses in here and see what it's doing and when you start getting out of line when you start getting on to the the high side a little bit you'll hear a difference in the sound that the needle makes going through the fabric oh really how you're going through over here you're just going through two layers of fabric than one layer batting if you get to the high side you're going through a lot more fabric and it sounds like bang bang bang instead of okay it's just it so listen to what your machine is doing and it will tell you when you're kind of wobbling a little bit once again so the question for you is this frame for me this frame is like the perfect height I have a feeling this might be a little tall for you it's a little tall for me but if I'm stitching at home I'm sitting at a tall grafting chair okay so you can adjust your height and for okay yep I mean that's really important too yep I would rather have it be a little bit high because I have greater visibility okay when it's lower then I'm kind of like trying to peer underneath the the needle to see where I'm going I want to be able to lean over so this is going to be really accurate really square yep and that's especially important because this is white fabric with a little black stop border and I don't want it to be wobbly okay so why did you do that back and forth right there you're gonna break here through admin a break me oh you're not gonna work your way down here nope I'm gonna get this line straight oh okay and when I start working down the edges of the quill let me leave myself a little bit about a tail here when I start working down the edges of the quilt I'm gonna keep these and you get this snap to get it out of the way so you'll have to tell why I'm going to bury my thread ends so when I'm working down the edges all right when I'm working down the length of the quilt I'm going to stitch these in the ditch as I go I'm gonna make sure that they're nice and straight when I stitch in the ditch as far as I can go until I run into the belly bar I'm gonna lead leave some thread tails and I will Stitch the right I'm sorry I will tie the thread tails from this stitching line to the thread tails from this okay time together in a knot Oh bearing my thread ends and I'll do that as I hop scotch my way down the quilt also a good body that I'm stitching another new tip today that's a grab it works like a charm why take the quilt off and turn it just to stitch a couple of lines and then it's just stitch them as okay so we won't cover that anymore I've went through a got this line straight the next thing I would do is get this line straight start working down here and then begin working in that top border but when I'm stitching in that top order and here's where we start talking about the stabilization work I'm not going to do any heavy quilting that would warp any of the rest of the quilt I want to work through my quilt doing only loose quilting a stabilizing a stable not loose like six stitches per inch but just the stabilizer yes just the stitch in the ditch yes no heavy fill no tight motifs okay only big motif so if we look at this quilt as an oh you got a lot of tight quilting going I've got a lot of tight quilting and I am NOT doing it all in one pass yeah I'm going to start as you can see I did some template work and I created these art shapes and then I filled in behind those arts shapes with a lot of heavy quilting my stabilization work on this pass would just be the arcs okay not the heavy quilting okay stabilizing as we go mm-hmm with my next pass I've got all these little pebbles and I've got all this micro stimming I'm not doing that the first trip through okay I'm only going to do this entire good work and that template work was created using just a melon shaped template I chalked or I'm sorry I didn't talk a line I use some invisible marking which I'll show you in just a second I marked a straight miter line here and I struggle my going here I put a little mark where I wanted the outside of this arch to be and a little mark where I wanted the inside of the arch to be the same thing over here mark mark I wanted I marked where I wanted these lines to come together right here I've got another little mark going where that little arch goes and then I just stitched this template work and I stitched stitching in the ditch a little bit inside the flower didn't stitch in the ditch to the outside because this is 3d petals so I didn't stitch that in the ditch um but I use a little circle template to just go up and over up there to create a little bit more design work and then I stitched so kind of some dissenter yeah a little bit more detail work in the center then I would start coming down the border the side borders and I work as much of the border as I could until I ran into the belly bar and ran out of space and I would have pre marked those borders ahead of time so I didn't have to stop and try and measure and know where my centre I'm gonna mark everything the distance so how do you figure out you just take your just say I'm gonna do this every so many inches or do you have a special tool I'm gonna figure out how many inches apart I want to place things and then I'm gonna market in the quickest most efficient way possible and I find that it's really tedious to use my rotary cutting ruler and you market the line of my rotary cutting a ruler put a little tick mark move my cutting ruler over and make a little tick mark so I got this tool and how cool is that that buttonhole 2 it is so cool it's called a sim flex SS and sam-i-am f as in Frank le ex sim flex expanding gauge and it is meant to mark buttonholes the pleats in a skirt pleats on drapes it is meant to evenly mark your fabric so you if you set these two points two inches apart everything is yeah everything's two inches of so doesn't say quilting but you just made that I have made yah quilt so where would you find something like this if you wanted to shop locally which I recommend that people do if you can find it at a local shop find it okay shop and buy it at a local shop okay and I would not so much look forward at a quilt shop because it's not a quilting tool you would find it at a general sewing store okay that specializes in garment sewing or okay that's probably because it is for garments oh yes absolutely so I'm just gonna figure out how far apart do I want these little template shapes to be I'm gonna set the correct distance B to between two of them and I'm gonna know that all of them I'm just gonna lay it down and I'm gonna take a piece of mechanical chalk pencil and just tick mark tick-tick-tick okay move it over and just keep going what kind of marking pencil I use a mechanical chalk pencil it's just like a mechanical okay you push the button on the top and instead of lead coming out it's comprised different way they're always white oh okay I've heard so many horror stories about blue and yellow not coming out the last thing that I want to do is carefully mark carefully stitch and then not be able to get my so that would just be heartbreaking so I mark with white if it's a white fabric and I'm not going to see my marks I will either use a light pearly gray chalk pencil my preferred brand is generals which you can get at any quick shock they always have general pencils you just want a light pearly gray that will show on your light fabrics or I do my invisible marking trick and the thing with white fabric is if you mark it and remove the marks and mark it and remove the marks because you stitch things wrong and you have to remark nori mark your fabric starts getting dirty in a bakery and it doesn't look crisp and white anymore and I want it to be crisp and white so to mark things for example we were talking about these arts to shapes coming together and I needed to mark that straight sister miter line I don't want to mark a line that I am gonna remove and make my fabric look dirty so what I do and I found this trick just by accidentally here comes another track this is cool I was stitching out an egg and dark border using templates and I stitched it in the wrong place okay and I ripped my stitches out to restage and I looked and I saw the holes from the stitching line and I was like you didn't have to mark I didn't have to mark they were and it was just like one of those light bulb moments where I just wait all I have to do is stitch a line of holes and I've got a marked line so in this corner where I wanted to put that miter line I would unthread my machine okay and just stitch back and forth a couple of times nice so do they come go away absolutely yeah batik batik you may need to scratch a little bit with your finger okay or with a clean soft like a baby toothbrush okay moisten it just very slightly and just rub the fan because those holds up close those holes right up you can see I mean you know that your stitch the stitch holes are always visible when you rip out a line of stitching so make those stitch holes work for you okay know what good idea on this line i invisible stitched bat the miter line and then I just put little crosshair lines of once again just empty stitch holes showing where I wanted the point okay of my arches to be I didn't have to remove any marks later my white fabric did not look dirty it just worked like a charm okay so I'm gonna work my way through the quilt doing the same thing with each advance doing this template work doing this template work making sure that these lines are nice and straight and to get these lines whenever we talked earlier about how I want to stitch in the ditch these lines as I work through the quilt people always ask well how do I keep those lines placed properly and I have a really cool product I don't sell this I just think it's the coolest thing ever this is by colonial as in you know colonial Co L o ni al and it is a zero center long arm measuring tape there is a zero in the center and the numbers go out to the left and out it to the right 77 yes and he said I have a 12-foot frame yep absolutely and it has these cool little sliders that just zip back and forth and you can park on you can ever you want them to be so I will I will use this measuring tape affixed to one end only of the machine because it comes with a little clip to do that yep and you just you've put when you first get it you line up the zero in the middle with the center of your your leader so that it is on it is in the center of so everything stays centered on them so because you are pinning the center of your quilt to the center of the leader you want the zero center of the measuring tape to be where the zero center of your quote would be I'm gonna just test you and see remember it was 13 and a half inches okay you can move those little sliders to whatever you might want to mark you can put a little slider where the edge of your quilt should be I can put a little slider where this seam line should be and another little side or where this sheet should be I can if I've got sashing strips I can put sliders where the sashing strips belong I've got seam lines or motifs I can put I think they come with like 20 little sliders you can put sliders from here to kingdom come and I think I know you can buy extra ones too yep and then when you're done with this quilt you shove all the sliders to want to do then move it like when you were ready to quilt you can also move it away and just start quilting yes I know some people clip it to both ends and it floats over the top but I like your technique yeah just bringing it over when I need it and tossing it when I'm done with it I don't like to have it laying on my work surface because I'm a dork and sooner or later I'm gonna stitch it into the quilt and then I'll be like oh that's fabulous time to buy a new one so with each advance I'm gonna check my little slider you're going to fear that that distance out from the center all the way down the moon so then when you get to the bottom you're not gonna have this and yep and I find that I won't remember where things are supposed to be lined up I won't remember that this is supposed to be an X number of inches so that the measuring tape works as my reminder and it just helps me keep it straight all the way down and when I get to the bottom everything is because I kept everything in its place all the way through and I pinned it on straight and square it's it's brainless industry it's a customer doesn't or a quilter doesn't have that tape they could just put a regular tape and kind of do the same thing maybe write down our made some notes yeah get some - oh yeah it's I think it's well worth the price it would be a bargain to end twice the price in my opinion yeah so when I get to the bottom of the quilt I've stabilized my way all the way through I haven't done any heavy fill work I've just stabilized stabilized stabilized when I get to the bottom I'm going to stabilize this bottom seam line get it nice and strain way you did the top with the same way I did the top exactly to get those corners straight I'm gonna baste everything into place the bottom of the quilt top is now unpinned from its leader and the whole quilt is mounted only to backing so now I can roll back and forth that's Paul in this poem I can roll back and forth as many times as I wish and I can go back through do all my heavy fill work knowing that nothing is going to distort because i stabilized everything so what happens if there's some fullness in the center how do you work with that as your quilting oh I've got such a cool trick soup cans you're gonna stop for lunch yeah I'm gonna stop for lunch let's go up for lunch oh let's see when you are trying to ease in fullness let me get this example out of the way let's say I've got a whole bunch of fullness in the center of my quilt it's really nice if you have someone with you to kind of hold the quilt down to help ease it but a lot of cultures quilt at home during the day there's nobody else at home with them so you can put if there is not too much fullness you can put two smaller soup cans one on either side Oh what good together - yep it just helps easing all the fullness the more fullness but bigger and heavier I know some people use like water bottles mm-hmm you know yeah then they would be lighter you could use bigger cans that would be heavier you can use remember do k10 can there and you just want to remember when you get to the edge of the quilt these cans they're wrong they roll along with your machine so when you get to the edge you make sure your dog is not laying there because it's enough o'clock and a roll off the quilting onto your foot or onto the dog so the more fullness you have the bigger soup cans you need okay so works like a charm Wow everybody has a soup cat or some cam mm-hmm vegetables so you take your preference yep those that can of green beans that you bought a year ago and nobody in your house likes green beans so they still are and it's just like having someone there to to lay their hands down and how about a good idea what a good idea looks like any other any fun are we like we've got it I think we got it I think you've got it it's just the key is putting it on there straight keeping it straight as you go through don't do any kind of stitching that is going to distort your lines until you get those lines nailed it down straight lines straight and straight lines first and then everything else comes out oh my gosh this has been it's so informative Thank You Kimmy you were very well I don't know happy to have you in our studio at handy thank you let's go out for lunch and have soup what do you think Kimmie thank you for joining us at handy with her there is so much information here our quilters are going to really have square quilts now awesome it really makes a big difference and a thing to remember is it doesn't take you any extra time you're doing exactly the same steps you're just doing them a slightly different order that's you better results so it's not like you're spending three hours extra quilting you're just doing the same coating in a different area well thank you thank you for joining us today thank you Mary Mary we'll see you again wasn't that great thanks for watching now remember March of 2016 you can find out other a true-life that we did and all of that information is there for you it's recorded so that you will be able to find it any time of the day that you want to watch it so see you again next month you

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 30,001

Rating: 4.9224377 out of 5

Keywords: Handi Quilter, Longarm, Sewing, Quilting, Quilts, Free-motion Quilting, Finishing Quilts

Id: 26SSrITN1IA

Length: 61min 18sec (3678 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 14 2018