What To Quilt On Your Quilt

my name is Karen Hanson and this is my store thank you very much for coming I'm going to talk today about what to call time your quilt I have been a long arm quilter for a long enough and so I have some experience with my quilts and other people's quilts and hopefully can give you some ideas about what to quilt on your quilt the first thing I think you need to ask yourself with your quilting for someone or for yourself is what is the quilt for and how will it be used because so many people come in with a quilt and they really don't know the difference between custom quilting or edge-to-edge quilting or stitch in the ditch quilting they don't even know what they're asking and it's helpful even for you if you think really what am I going to do with this am I going to wash it a lot is it a baby quilt do I really need to spend 27 hours quilting it the other thing you want to look at is what's the most important thing about the quilt now if you're the quilt top maker you may know that you spend a long long time on one particular part and you want to show that off with the quilting you also maybe have a couple areas that you hope will quilt out and and you know that you need to maybe do a little more heavy quilting in those areas is there an area on the quilt that you want to highlight usually in any kind of artwork and I'm going to call a quilt artwork sort of there's areas that come forward when you look at it and there's areas that recede when you look at it quilting can make that difference for you and you need to kind of decide that as you look at it what's the style of the quilt is it modern are you a so whist or is it traditional the patterns that you choose to put on the quilt can also relate to the kind of fabrics that are used in the quilt as well as the style of the piecing I will say yesterday someone was in and the church ladies had long long time ago brought in a set of very sweet embroidered flowers you guys know that hi bright pale pinks light blue on white and she picked out a very modern pattern to set it with and she's using some Aboriginal fabrics I think it's going to be really great when it's done I hope the other people in her church group don't give her a bad time but the style of that quilting will probably be much more modern than a traditional Baptist fan for example had she said it with pastel pinks and blues it could have been a much different quilt and had much different quilting on it whose quilting it in what is there slash your skill set so the first thing that anybody asked me is what should I quilt on my quilt you know the obvious answer to that is what can you quilt on your quilt if your quilting it yourself and one of the things I hope to talk about today is some simple things that you can do that maybe you don't know you can do that actually look pretty good if you are paying somebody to quilt your quilt I think it makes a big difference as to what decisions you make when the quilter looks at you and says well what do you want me to do and you say well I don't know I say well black thread then and we kind of go from oh no no no that's not what I want that helps get them going but how much time do you want to invest in quilting the quilt is an important consideration or how much money so if you are making a quilt that's a gift for someone who really doesn't know much about quilting you may not need to spend as much time quilting it yourself or not as much money paying somebody to quilt it we mostly use edge to edge pantographs on everything that's in here we do very few custom quilts because we think we want the piecing to show so we don't want to do anything fancy and their quilted the other reason you want to use an edge to edge if you've got busy fabrics in there look up here on most of them unless you're in the right light you can't really see the quilting so if you've got really really busy prints you may not want to have it custom quilted now does everybody know what I mean when I talk about custom versus the other so I'm going to talk about the elements of quilting and edge to edge ie you can call edged edge quilting design you can call it a pantograph design you can call it a meander anything that covers the surface of the quilt like this can everybody see the quilting on this orange and turquoise one anything that covers the whole surface of the quote from one edge to the other without any consideration of the blocks or the borders is an overall edged edge design we lots of times use pantograph patterns if you've never seen whoops if you've never seen a pantograph pattern this is an example okay on a long on machine this is going to sit on the back of a table and you can follow it with a laser light they make lots and lots of pantograph patterns for short-arm machines as well or home machines if any of you have a handi quilter frame that's how I learned one foot on the floor one foot on the pedal and following it with with it worked it worked but anyway an overall design or edge to edge works great if it's a scrappy quilt because you probably can't see the quilting anyway there's lots of quotes that we've quilted that I'm not sure why we've taken the time to do on the custom quilting job when you can't see much of the quilting anyway from the bottom can you dig it out somebody made me custom quilt their quilt I don't know why because you can't really see much of the quilting anyway but this is a great example now if it were her quilt and she was going to quilt it herself she could have done it a custom job if she so desired and no one would think twice about it because she made me do it I'm still whining about it may continue on for several more years but um you know I think the quilting looks good on it but you can't even tell me what's quilted out here in this border you can see that okay you got a little leaf woohoo big deal in this border but the rest of it is magnificently quilted and you don't even know it you just have to take my word for it that's really really good it's really really good but you can't tell now the other thing in the most show-off you thing about this back is that a you can't really see the quilting but be it's pieced and smartypants over here did piece it and you can't see the seam but where she's in treatment for that and we're trying to we're trying to get around it okay so you know overall meanders over all loops when I first started quilting for me I got my quilts quilted and they were done and it's not a quilt till it's quilted so all of these things are good things but if it's not an overall then it's custom it's sort of like you have a pantograph or you have an overall thing and anything else is custom so when someone comes in and says oh I don't want much I just want it stitched in the ditch that's custom let's talk about what those kind of things mean if you stitch your quilt in the ditch and by stitching in the ditch that means you're sewing along a seam line it's an easy way to make decisions about a quilt how it's quilted because you don't have to really plan a design you can stitch around the blocks you can stitch around the borders the problem with stitching in the ditch if there's not a ditch you can't stitch in it what because if you are not a good presser you did not press a ditch and I know who you are because what happens is that when you stitch in the ditch and this is really for the newbies is when you stitch you press your seam to one side the ditch is the lower part right so you can feel along the seam and you're going to sew on the lower part along the seam line on a small machine it's easier to stitch in the ditch than it is on a long-arm machine because it's steady or you're on a platform on the long arm you have to use a ruler and it's just harder so when you ask your long arm quilter to stitch in the ditch know that it's harder to do if you're doing it and you're new you're going to need to practice and it's very time-consuming background fillers are the simple designs that can be anything and that's probably for me one of the hardest things people say what should I quilt on my quilt right so there's the basics of in the ditch and then there's block-by-block sometimes let's just say a small custom job is maybe you have one border so on the inside of the quilt you do an overall pattern and I would just like to tell y'all that there's no shame in overall loops or an overall meander if you can do it and that's what you can do good that goes back to what can you do there's nothing wrong with that and part of make doing a good job is picking a simple theme and being consistent with it so I used to say about desktop publishing in the 80s that you could make a lot of ugly real fast right every font every color every size woohoo okay pick a couple motifs and stay with it pick something like an overall loop or you know a loop with a little swirl and be consistent with those things but there's no shame in just putting an overall piece on the bulk of it and maybe a simple border the other side of that we're getting picky you now are those blocks to me and I know this is what you're going to ask me about block by block what do you do right the worst quotes that I hate to quilt sampler quilts they are so hard I have to think so hard because every block is a little bit different and if I've chosen a couple motifs up front I've usually I'll say okay I'm using loops and swirls that's it if I'm staying with that I can kind of come up with some designs for those sampler blocks to move through them but everyone I sort of have to plan a new route okay so far any questions so far well I'll show you so that's a great question I have a marker board I have another that's a pen no and if I did you would okay when I teach the beginning long arm class I like to use them there's a book called Sally Terry's pathways to better quilting in case you haven't heard of it those do in the beginning class we've seen this part she says there's five basic shapes to quilting and I think she's absolutely spot-on so there's a loop okay there is a straight line okay there's a hook I like to think of it as cursive C's okay there's an s-curve okay and the last one there's an arc tada that's it thank you for coming no I have an eraser so when you talk about a swirl it's really a C so we'll talk about some things like that so from those basic shapes realistically you might see complicated quilting but if you can break it into those five different shapes you can do anything in a swirl is really just a hook there's a swirl right and you can decide that you're going to go like this with those swirls and they're not really ever going to cross over or you can combine them with something so of course I have to put a little arc in there there's another swirl and you can see I'm using an arc to move around there and pretty soon I've got a nice filled design okay very very easy just with those simple simple shapes yes you can I can't but you can I can only move the machine I cannot move the fabric you can't go back and forth from one to the other so this morning I I took a poll of how many were using a long-arm machine and how many were using the short-armed machine and my best advice for the shorter members was to sign up for the homeroom class okay but from those basic shapes you can make almost anything so overall let me keep going with what I was going to talk about so background fillers are a choice that you usually make okay and from those basic shapes when I look at a quilt let's talk about that dreaded sampler quilt it's not that it's a bad quilt it's just that I have to really think about it what am I going to do in it and the easiest thing for a lot of long arm quilters is the feather because it you know it fits it fills it can go anywhere but really sometimes you have to say a feather quilt is not work on this quilt it's got lots of geometric shapes I'm going to put a swirl to contrast against the geometric shapes and back to how do you make those choices right so something with a lot of hard edges might be need a little softening up with the swirl or something like that but if you choose maybe a couple things that you can combine you're going to have a few things so let's say I'm going to just do loops and swirls and I've got a bunch of blocks and I'll just start with something simple like a nine patch - like how I so this is probably one della made for me okay now first of all how do you figure out what to quilt on your quilt I can't quilt without my tracing paper okay if you don't have I tell people if you're a beginning quilter and you want to think about the quilting versus the piecing number one go get yourself a sketchbook you need to start making some muffle memories and some visual memories of what you're going to do so I know you watch my friend she's like she just does that well I've done it a lot the trick is somebody said well you have a background in graphic design I said no I work for Hewlett Packard for five years all those meetings all those phone calls right but a sketchbook start looking at things you'll start seeing things most of you know I spend a lot of time at the hockey rink I'll be at the hockey rink going people look at my husband and say what is she doing he's like she's quilting in the shower working it out right so I have sketchbooks of things these guys will tell you if you go upstairs on my desk there's little post-it notes that have oh that's okay I'm working it out I'm copying things that I'm trying to build a visual memory and I'm trying to have a recipe book of things that I can pull on because hand-eye coordination I can do it brain pretty locked in just about four different things I can make for dinner right I got that's all I got so sketchbooks are great for a repertoire next becomes the tissue paper why do you want the tissue paper because if you have some tissue paper and I go through a lot of it it's a little pricey but I'll go over and buy you know eight or ten pads at a time can't pull it out all by myself I'm gonna drop it okay so here's my tissue paper here's my block I like to put one piece of tissue paper over my block and trace the block then go home I probably pinned up the quilt already then I go home one of the first things you have to do is decide what is your block so let's look at the brightly colored one two three four forth quilt up high the pinks oranges okay what's the block is it the four patch inside the white box are you going to quilt the motif that's just in the four patch or are you going to quilt the bigger motif that includes the white box or are you going to expand it up even more and quote one great big feathered wreath for example that includes the white box and the peace triangles around it does everybody see what I mean so when you put your quilt on the wall to look at it lots of times I'll ask Tracy if she's if I'm working on a quote I'll say could you just take a photograph of it before I do it so I can look at it later because when it's on the table I can only see a little bit so she'll take a picture of it and that helps me in this case you might look at it what did I say Tracy that's one of the AC girls you know whatever she's going to be my daughter-in-law everyone say we're so sorry for her later we're sorry it's great anyway for thing right she gets me she's I'm getting a better side of the deal anyway if you can decide what your block is and what you're going to do in it or how you're going to split it up for example on that quote I might decide you know I really want those white squares to recede into the background and I want to pop up the little four patch in the middle I could do a little tight tiny background fill on those white squares and push them down into the background it would make whatever was in those little four patch boxes just pop right but like I said you need to have a couple different repertoire items in your head and it's better if you kind of know what you're going to do trust me from spending my whole first year of thinking I'll just do it and then ripping it out it's a lot better if you mess up on paper first so if you put your ball your block on your main tissue paper then you can go through pages and pages of pages of saying well I need Lupe's here so let's see what if I just did big loopy loopy loopy woops sorry no Kate loopy loopy loopy loopy loopy do I like that I don't know and then sometimes another trick is if it's really bad you can go over it again and suddenly that makes ribbony Lupe's the thing I can do this on the machine and you can go from there but the nice part about the tissue paper is you say oh that's not what I had in mind and you can move over here another piece of paper yeah yeah yeah okay and you can say you know I'm going to do something totally different I'm going to try my swirl in this block and I'm going to come up here and I'm going to do a swirl and I'm going to come over here and I'm going to do a swirl I'm going to come over here and I'm going to you see and you can mess up on the paper or do whatever you're going to do right much better to do it on paper over and over so that's just a simpler way to help yourself along of what you're going to do then you have to look at well what can I do obviously I can't do those swirls very good so I'll try something else so I could stitch in the ditch on this block one of the things I could do is just stitch in the ditch and I could do a real tight fill in some of the every other blocks and that would make me a nice checkerboard and I could come over here in the block next to it which just happens to be blank and I could repeat the same motif in thread without the block pattern or I don't really want to stitch in the ditch because I'm not very good at it so there's a lady who's got a really really old machine and it's so old they went to fix it once in her left hand handle all she has is the screwdriver no switch just the screwdriver and you know what she's quilting up a storm over there with what she does best and she just starts up here and she Wiggles down and she Wiggles over and she Wiggles back up and she Wiggles over and she Wiggles around and she she doesn't and she uses the block outline to do something that looks pretty cute and if you really didn't like it again go around again pretty soon you got a little ribbon anything going on so what to quilt on your quilt comes back to in some ways what can you do and a little bit of your imagination and you put some of those shapes together and you'll find that you can actually make quite a few things some things you can actually simplify so I'll show you some tricks because everybody wants to know how to make a feather or am I wrong nobody cares want to know how to make a feather sure okay there's lots of ways number one way I was taught you come up the feather there's an s-curve okay the top of the S you make another s-curve half a heart and you just follow the line down and for those of you that struggle with this follow the line follow the stem don't touch it go alongside of it real close don't do what can you all see that okay what not to do right burn burn burn bad don't do that no no no oh Carol's watching Carol's my inspector when I quilt Carol comes a bra yeah she likes to see what I'm doing so there's your little feather there right now the other side of it is you've got two choices and when I first learned I could only go in one direction so I had to travel back up and do another row and see how right here I'm going to curve around a little bit more and if you don't like the way that looks you can always decorate it you can come back in here and fill that little guy up and if you know you're going to decorate it in the beginning it helps because you can leave yourself a little more room okay you get the idea you're like well that's great that's just one feather what about another feather right well one of the things you need to have to learn how to do and back is just that that I call it a half an echo how do you feel something up how do you quilt to fill oh yeah that sounds so easy right quilt to fill well sometimes you may just have to stop but let's say let's let's say the challenges is that I came all the way up here and I'm like okay and you say you Karen you just can't lift your pencil up so I came up here and I went well I come over here and I got another one going over here and I'm going to cheat a little bit and just do the other side little echo but you can always echo anything around and and so on and so forth but you don't always have to echo the whole thing exactly okay just move yourself around but this is where it really helps if you just have a little sketchbook or something to do and you're like I don't care what you say I cannot do those feathers I hate those feathers and they look really dumb and floppy in a way so there's other kinds of feathers you can do and feathers make good borders same idea but a hook or you want to get real crazy you can do an heirloom feather which starts out as a a feather okay one two and then you have to trace over it you kind of learn to get a rhythm there what you're doing I can't believe I'm talking to you and doing this at the same time oh not too bad hmm - sighs hmm sometimes you might have a big motif or a quote where you really want to put in these things do these things first okay come over here do the next thing you can come back in and just fill it with a little tiny fill later okay you can quote it evenly all over or you can put some certain motifs in and leave it be sometimes it's like working on a painting believe it or not the best advice I ever got about doing a drawing was that don't ever start down here in the corner doing this because by the time you get to the other side you're tired of that that's really good by the way right there okay do the whole thing at once so put in your big components first plan your quilt a little bit sometimes you might just draw in using a big you know like a I like to use the so line pencils and I know if I'm coming in so then pencil maybe I know I'm going to have a big feather or I mean a big flower here so I'll mark that circle that I know I'm going to go around it with my feather and I'm going to come back in later with something else okay and as far as where do you find those motifs or how do you put them in there or how do you do it you see things like Laura Lee Fritz where she's got amazing drawings and you think I can't do that at all I can't I can't it's actually a lot easier than you think you only have to figure out what some of those big motifs are so I'll I'll use Laura Lee Fritz as an example she's got books and books of for example a horse and she'll have a bear and you know she'll have a dog and you think well she just drew those no she didn't and she's putting it in her book after she's erased it a few times and made the continuous line and how do you do that on your quilt well you can trace it on your quote before you put it on your machine but you can also just trace those kind of things onto glad press and seal anybody ever use this stuff available at your grocery store you can size anything up or down using your handy dandy dandy little printer maybe you've got a printer at home I have like 16 of them if we work for HP and asmol numbers on the way this is glad press until it's by the Reynolds Wrap and the saran wrap it's sticky it's got a little micro suction cups and you can trace over it you want to use something like a Sharpie that's permanent ink because you don't want anything that will bleed if it gets wet or flake if it's like a like this dry erase you write you draw right on it it will stick how's that on your microphone bad bad okay for here it will stick you can sew right through it on your sewing machine and then you're going to pull it is off the top it off the stitches will pop through it so yes I put it right on the book see let's say oh how it's going to show you this book I have two new books that were taking pre-orders for if you aren't aware all of our books are now 20% off all the time because I got tired of competing with Amazon so there you go okay so it's sticky on one side right I can put it right on what I want to do and trace with my sharpie I'm going to put this right on the fabric see it sticks you can pin it in a couple places but it will stick so right over it pull it up throw it it's if you sew a lot of things so if you have a habit of going for Improv Everywhere in one little place it will be hard to get it out but if you have a little like a quarter of an inch gap between everything it won't be bad if you said oh I'm going to copy one of her feathers you know you might if you had a habit and you've got a big mess in some of these where you were all over the stem you might have a harder time getting it out if that's the case they make products like called Solvay which you can draw on them again you want to use a permanent marker like a sharpie or a Prisma pen and it when it gets wet it dissolves so once you wash it it'll come right out okay so it kind of comes down to making all those decisions for your quilts I think if you pick a couple motifs and you've got blocks you can use the blocks to do simple things I think a lot of those things are easy but how do you know what to do in those blocks I'm going to go back to those five basic shapes play around with it draw the block give yourself make yourself do four different options for that block like playing Scrabble anybody playing words with friends I'm beating dialogue um okay my son in the back not so much but he's beating me but I think he's cheating um anyway if you're playing Scrabble or something like that don't you rearrange your letters and then you're like okay I think I can spell the word top let's see if I got anything else with these letters right with my seven letters take a couple shapes I'm going to give yourself start with something simple like a nine patch or a turn - block and say I'm going to come up with an idea for this block that just uses loops and you're seeing some things look at your quilting magazines and pick some things and look at the background fills now this is my new book and yes I'm selling it to you this is the checkered rep was here this week and I said I have to have that book she's a nice this is her one copy that she sells from but I can pre-order it for you so I said give me that book I'll take names on Saturday you don't have to pay for it tuck comes in but I get a coffee I like it now this is back to I can do everything in this book later I'll get it so you can see it I can do everything in this book but I can always think of it so if you have a notebook full of little ideas and designs good for you but I think the books kind of handy just to say oh look at all those different fills I like this one I saw this and one of in a border around something right a little like the white border around that four patch just turn the corner went down weren't just cute there's a website online I think the gal has 365 different quilting designs that you can go and look at but this for me was just one idea and she gets a little yeah see that's where a fill comes in handy do some lines do some fills I've got uh someone at soup on my table today I don't know why it's just like okay it's really not my colors and it says somebody so how many of you think that's just right up my alley I struggle with some of those things and I'm going to start on it tomorrow I've been thinking about it for a week sometimes I just do I can't help it but you know I have a couple choices what can you do around an applique I save things about okay can I so on top of the applique do I need to do I need to put any little bows on your apron or do I just you know outline her and then do a background fill am I going to put something in the background very very popular things are just outlining right or echoing around and around there's another style of echoing that I like a lot better called McTavish's you guys familiar with that at all I'll give you a little example of that so I don't like echoing as much because it bothers me when it's not perfect I know but here's your application shape you can also see why don't have poked a a lot thank you I don't know I live in Arizona that's not that one okay so echo quilting probably where you're just going to go around it and you go around it and you go around it and it gets really boring pretty darn fast and a big block in my opinion I'm just like going around and and and they don't like to listen to me whine about that either because believe me I'm whining about it and every time I do it because I just get to the point where I'm like I don't know what else to do when I do it I fence I rip it out every damn time I've been quoting for like ten years I'm still ripping it out so here's my applique give you a different way to fill this block it's called McTavish ring and it's really sort of the same thing and you might start out as an echo right but then you kind of veer off and you do something else and you just kind of count and you just curve around and I usually counts to four and then she goes a different direction if she backtracks more but there's really not a lot of rules about this so she might BACtrack but she'll come down to here and then kind of do this then you can do that do that do that and just basically fill in the space and that's much better for me okay and you can kind of if you've ditched it you can kind of come around there so this is a named after a lady named Karen McTavish who I don't know she just started doing it and she does little tiny things and everybody just started doing it and so everybody called it McTavish Inge and there you go and you can kind of go from there and if you want to it's kind of back to the thing if you wanted to set a big motif before you got in there let's say this was the applique but you wanted it to have another little flower up here here do you quilt that in and then you just include that in whatever you're doing down here right and pretty soon you've just got another little something in there blah blah blah blah blah okay only on the longer I can't do it anywhere else I could pass around some things I've quilted now so we have some samples of things to talk about because I wanted to talk about choosing thread color choosing fabrics I don't know where my pen cap is so one of the things that my employees have said to me since working here is that they have a whole different perspective on choosing fabrics and quilts and backs and thread color because they see so many things come in so many of us make a top choose the back with no thought whatsoever of how it's going to be quilted or what thread color we're going to use and that makes a big difference so when you're piecing your top you may have just loved it when you saw it in the quilt shop they tell me be careful what I quilt on a sample because I have to do it another 12 times you know and that's right but you may have loved it in the quilt shop because of how it was quilted be aware of that and and be sure that you can do that and that's another reason we don't custom quilt all our samples because we don't want to do something that you can't necessarily make or you know have to make it to get that effect right but as you're picking your tops and you're picking your backs you want to think about the thread color if you're a really good quilter and you want that quilting to show pick a contrasting thread on that sunbonnet sue don't you think they'd be just irritated as hell if I use black thread in the background right because they want to see my quilting I betcha but what we see a lot is that the top is just gorgeous and obviously like the someone answ who needs to be quilted with white thread in most of it but let's say the back is a solid royal blue my personal preference is that light thread looks okay on dark dark thread on light looks terrible it just grates on my nerves but on the back you are going to see every little niggle and bubble on the front a lot of those stops and starts are hidden in the edge of an applique or in a seam but on the back you're going to see it all so my favorite quotes how a showman this I brought these to show you this was quilted this is my first quilt I ever made I cut out this is one of you've heard me talk about cutting I cut it out on my plush carpeting on the floor I did have a rotary cutter in a mat because I'll be doing I knew what I was doing so some of the stripes are different sizes they're all supposed to be the same and I quilted it with monofilament thread and I used my small machine and I quilted it in little double rows diagonally and the best way to make evenly spaced lines is with masking tape because you just have to sew one and then you just move your tape over but as bad as I was at piecing for my first one and not knowing anything about clothing it looks pretty darn good you can't even see the quilting which again is just fabulous take my word for it and and even the piecing is a little iffy it quilted out thank God most of it and I don't think there were any holes in it and I use this quilt all the time which goes back to my point you do what you can do okay we'll just drop them down another quilt that I quilted through the Dottie going Dottie one and this was the pillow I made with the pieces that would not fit and this they had to be redone so then just like well just make a pillow this is one of the first quotes I ever quilted on the long arm machine and back to you do what you can do I did the whole thing in three and a half hours which end are you takin nan Kelly let me use her machine after many weeks of practicing on charity quilts and again it's pretty busy you can't really see what I did it is the craziest I call it drunken sailor quilting and the good news it these are spirals if you'd like to look at really really wild and uneven spirals and I think it's better than anything I could do today because now I can make a perfect spiral and I would try and I would make perfect things and it just wouldn't be as interesting because it's pretty woohoo right and I would like to point out the fabulous back because I was using white thread and you can't see it it's wonderful because you can't see it so sometimes a busy back with a small pattern because a busy back with a small pattern is going to hide your quilting and you have to make some decisions so let me show you something how about the one with the funky border on it it's going to cats it's not that you can hand me that one next to one where it's called black red this one right here red and black Smith yeah so this is an interesting one to show you this is Kat she brought it in somebody else quilted it a while ago I mean it's not bad well like we won't we won't pick it apart but it's not bad but what I would show you is what is really kind of different about it is the back because she switched thread colors so she's got white in the main part of it but if you look on the back she used a red thread in the border and then I told Kat this morning I said I said it before it was out of my mouth before I realized I was saying Oh looky there she's got this little tiny black stipple outlining the feather on the edge and the stipple is a little bit big so it really doesn't do his job which should be if you want it to pop and you're just into small area you're going to have to do a little denser and you really see that red and black on the back of your quilt you get to decide if you want that or not had she chosen a busier back you know something with a little bit of everything in it because there's white thread on it maybe a little black red white smaller you never see it but you guys get to decide you know I have my customers that come in and I look and I'm like oh the back and they're like yes I want to see everything I'm like that's a lot of pressure okay why not this is another reason of why you probably shouldn't custom quilt something this is my own quilt so I can custom quilt it if I want to because I don't have to pay anybody to do it and but you really can't see too much of the quilting I chose yellow bright yellow thread it kind of blends everywhere if you really want to see any of these you can come up afterwards and look and on the back I'm really good I like to show you how good I am all the time see this is my kind of back because you can't pick me apart much better okay let's some show the multicolored ones this one I think is the stunning one okay thread color the trend today is I will also say uber quilting lots and lots and lots of quilting right so people ask me what color thread I or what kind of thread I like I really do like the so fine thread that we stock now and that's all I've been using because it's finer and it lays a little flatter and if your thread color is going to match the background of your quilt you're not going to see that big hunks of thread because you maybe went over things a while so this is pretty densely quilted in some places but um the gal quilted it and cat wasn't happy with it and she talked to her and she said oh I wanted more quilting and I think this is a great example I'll just show you the back cat said can you do some more so let's turn it for the front she went back in with a different color thread and did you know sort of a twice quilted thing and put in some accents which really make the quilt now what do you quilt on your quilt if you have someone else quilting your quilt you really have to have a good relationship with them because I would never do this for someone unless they said I really want you to do that because this is really an artistic statement and in my opinion just one of the reasons why you should quilt your own quilts because you know that's not a lot let's look at this that's not really even a lot of technical skill she did a shape and she went over at multiple times little thread painting if you're not real steady go around again okay if you're drawing something I find lots of times that if you're drawing a main motif like this flower or the leaves and here with the little swirl she's kind of come up with a tendril and then gone back over it a little ribbon he look if you're not perfect just backtrack over the other way or if you're trying to draw a motif on it some of your main motifs I'll try to draw like you know the flowers and then come up with a connector and maybe my connectors just a little loopy or the little leaf but I've gone around the flower maybe two or three times to make that pop out just a little bit more I could go on and on but I don't want to keep you all day so do you have any questions or anything that you would like me to address specifically how do you do it is the same motion and you have to practice in your sketchbook and you know that's the bad news you need to work at HP because they will you know bore the snot out of you so bad that so part of the thing of in your sketchbook is learning how to draw something to fill the space and somebody this morning asked well how do you not get yourself in a corner it's really the same idea of you have to learn how to go upside down cross write the other way what I was going to say when I learned to do a feather I was taught to go this way and I saw a picture of a quilt of mine once and alls I could see was this and I thought hey so I didn't want to go up that line again so I made myself learn how to go the other way and the good news is that feathers are never symmetrical a little bit like you're you know you might draw a little bit one way a little bit the other way but it doesn't matter but you just kinda have to do a little practice that you can go left and right and up and down the other side of it on a border and there's tons of border patterns that you can people say how do you put in a border tons of border patterns maybe some you don't get past the free motion you stay with the patterns and the pantographs the only problem is that you have to do the top order and the corners to the middle bottom in the corners and you have to take it off and turn it and make it fit and do it and I did a lot of that but that's let's go back to what I said at the very beginning how much time or how much money and why is your long arm quilt are so expensive when people take my long arm quilting class I always tell them you're either going to really really love it or you're going to give me a much nicer Christmas gift than you were thinking because you're going to appreciate more what some what some of your favorite quilters might be doing in terms of they just don't go out and quote your quilt lots of them look at it think about it plan it come up with the design all that practice did I have another question yes absolutely is there a cost difference between pentagram pantograph quilting and custom quilting there sure is both if you're doing it or if somebody else is doing it most of our long arm quilters that rent our machines can do an overall king or queen size quilt in one day pretty easy right don't you think ah three weeks later I'll be honest with you custom quilting is not lucrative for me I I enjoy doing it I take my time if I've quilted something for you you can say I know I had to wait forever for her to get it done but the cost in the cost wise is about it's at least double in most there's a lot of that here's a good way to put it there's a lot of variety out there there's some custom long arm quilters that are very very good and you know it's like your hairdresser I guess that don't I look nice but this cost me somebody said why don't you get a new phone it you know your phone shuts itself off all the time buy yourself a new damn phone I said I can't afford it I got my hair done but those are you know those are some of the choices and it find a quilter you like ask to see their work ask them to give a bid on your project if you think you're going to have somebody else do it is the best thing I would say make to see some things they've done I wouldn't even trust me I've got nothing to show oh I got one thing that black thing where is it one more thing I'll show I'm going to get the black one up I can't hardly show you anything I wouldn't and I'm too slow I got this one in cats maybe that one the other one so here's another example of custom quilting that hardly shows but I think it's worth it now this quilt we had as a kit in Carroll in Della sorry can you hear me back there carrot Carolyn della hand appliquéd this needle turn isn't that stunning and I did custom quilt the sample now somebody asked me if I would sell it and I said because we sell a lot of our samples and I said no no I don't think I could sell it I'd have to sell it for at least a thousand dollars and they said I'll pay this morning somebody said I'll pay a hundred or a thousand and 100 whatever 1,100 I said no it's really it's not for sale but it's worth that you know if somebody but it's not worth it to somebody who doesn't appreciate it I don't really want the Mona Lisa I think it's ugly but worth a lot of money right so you have to decide what what kind of things you like and I guess last Thank You doll she's so good Vanna this is a pattern that we have for sale in the shop that cat designed and we've I've quoted it a couple of times I think it's a beautiful beautiful quote and it allows for some very show-off e types of quilting but when you're making it you kind of know you're going to have some nice quilting in it and you could have just done and let's say you could have just done an overall background fill and all of it it'd still be a nice quote but not near as stunning so I think this is a good example of quilting makes any other questions no no I use a lot of circle plastic circle templates and I'll mark a mark across circle when I'm doing there I just helped here they're just drop it and drop it like a hot potato this will be a small version of a big border okay I got a big border we'll pretend that 100 inches okay so I won't I know of how big the quilt is when I'm looking at it and I kind of will mark it off and say well I'm going to have a circle in this corner and I usually have an uneven number so let's just say I'll put one here and one here one here and one in the corner and I'll mark goes off at equal intervals just with a mark of marking tool okay and then I'm going to use a curve to draw the spine and what happens is I just draw a little bit and I'll draw the curve so this one's going to come around this way and then the next one sorry I got to go room it's going to come around that way okay and I'm all mark those again so now let's just use that in the line now I'm ready to quilt it and it's really pretty easy because you're going to come run with your feather it's a little bigger than I probably do it you get the idea and you come around this corner you go like this and you just wrap yourself back around and you say well what are you gonna do in those little areas by a little circling thing you may be okay you get the idea and also you can decide beforehand what you're going to do you're either going to fill to the edge you know so you're either going to come in here when you're doing it and do something that kind of goes around like that or you know does something or later you're going to come back do some kind of fill in behind it those are choices you on a custom quote job you want to spend a little time with the quilt before you just start sewing because trust me you'll be really mad I have picked out some I'm really fast at picking it out but why would that be practice right well that's not the thing you want to practice I changed my mind after the first block or two Oh am i peeved because I know I'm going to pick it out my husband the first the first year I was a long-arm quilter you know house hunting husband say don't ask me if that makes you look fat well my husband used to say don't ask me if you should pick it out because you know you're gonna so having a plan ahead of time is going to save you hours and hours I'll have it down 15 minutes to quilt it is three hours picking it out oh I'm fast okay any other questions I'm probably way over time I appreciate it Della's passing out a coupon you could have just asked for that right up front we would have been done you

Channel: Quilt Expressions

Views: 431,905

Rating: 4.7995963 out of 5

Keywords: What To Quilt, Quilt, Expressions, Quilting, Sewing, Boise, Idaho, Karen, Hanson, Long Arm

Id: emNxOb-oQfM

Length: 58min 21sec (3501 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 18 2012