Part 5: Quilting for Machine Artists…More on Rulers and Then There Are Gloves

Posted on November 18, 2016December 13, 2016 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in Reviews, Ruler work, Tools / 2 Comments

I finally borrowed my Beth’s (Daughter in law who has a Gammill longarm on frame) collection of Gadget Girl’s quilting rulers in order to try them out for sit-down quilting. While she has a nice collection that allowed me to get a feel for their rulers, they have many more available on their site.

testing rulers from Gadget Girls

This part of this blog series has been really fun. After playing with them for a couple of days, I have several thoughts on using these rulers at sit-down longarms or domestic machines. Keeping in mind that I am very much an amateur when it comes to ruler work, I still think you may find my observations a little useful:

Gadget Girls rulers seem really nice and heavy with good markings, but I found they needed something to stop them from slipping for sit-down machine quilting as all the other rulers I tried do. I have used sandpaper dots and on some there were already some small rectangles of spongy self-liner double taped on.
Beth uses them on her frame mounted Gammill longarm, and most of them work just as well for me on my Bernina Q20.
I had no problem with the bigger ones on my Q20 but found them much more difficult to use on my domestic sit-downs. Part of this is the harp length and part of this is because it is not possible to sew with the ruler behind the ruler foot as it is on my Q20. This makes it necessary to turn the quilt when using the domestics, which I don’t have to on my Q20, and that makes it more likely to have the ruler slip or jump from its location before you have completed taking full advantage of the ruler. I’m not saying it’s not possible to use these bigger rulers on the domestic, but it’s harder and would require a lot more practice.
I did love the things you can do with some of these longer bigger rulers, especially for long or big areas. I’m sure there is a lot that could be figured out by playing with these rulers.

Ropes and swags
She loaned me one of those rulers with the notch out that goes around the ruler foot they call a stitch guide. It is often used by frame-based longarmers for controlling stitch-in-the-ditch and stitching around appliques. I found this to be completely unusable for both my Q20 longarm sitdown and my domestic machines. It makes sense, but I had to try just to see if I was missing something.
My favorite rulers from Beth’s collection are
I found that the Gadget Girls circles and straight rulers and Lisa Calle’s circles and straight rulers were equally useful, though I think Lisa Calle’s straight rulers are slightly better marked for my purposes, but you might prefer Gadget Girls for yours.

Three Types of Quilting Glove Solutions

I talked about the use of quilting gloves in one of my previous posts in this series. It really helps a lot in handling the rulers, especially the larger ones. I have tried three types of solutions.

Fons and Porter quilting gloves: These are comfortable soft gloves and they allow lots of air through the gloves so my hands don’t get too hot or uncomfortable. They move on my fingers slightly more than the Machingers, but I love these gloves and these are what I would choose if I could only have one pair of gloves. They are washable.
Machingers: These have a different fabric feel, fit tighter and allow less air through the gloves. They hardly move on my fingers at all as I guide the quilt and rulers through. They help keep my hands going longer, because they are tighter. I use these those days when my hands are a little tired and I need to quilt long hours. I don’t find them as comfortable as Fons and Porter gloves though. These, too are washable, and that’s good because they seem to pick up more color from the fabric dyes.
Cut off ends of rubber gloves designed for the kitchen: I tried these, because I had seen other quilters use them and they were inexpensive. I simply couldn’t keep the finger ends on some of my fingers. I have really small hands so that might be the reason. I did not like this solution, but you might.

Sew happy everyone. Take time to experiment and play at your machine. You will get the time spent back when you are making something you really want to come out right.

Preparing for an Exhibit in the Spring

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in Books, Classes, Food for Thought, My micro-business, quilt shows, selling quilts / 4 Comments

I haven’t finished my blog series on quilting for domestic machine artists, but I thought I’d tell you about a coming happening. G Street Fabrics will be hosting an exhibit of my quilts in the spring of 2017.

I have taken a hard look at the quilts I will have available and have decided it would be good if I can make several new quilts for that. I’m excited about this. So I will be backing off from showing my quilts in quilt shows around the country.

I recently purchased a new Shaheen vintage panel and will make a second quilt along the same lines of “Hawaiian Garden” shown below and offer it for sale at the exhibit. The panel is different, but I will be adding a similar border drawing the design from that panel.

Hawaiian Garden: I made this for MQX Albert Shaheen exhibit quilts this year. I recently gave this quilt to my brother Pat and his wife Carol in celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary this year. So I no longer have this quilt. The central panel is a vintage Shaheen panel and I designed and painted the border based on the panel design.

In addition to that one, I have some ideas for additional quilts that I think I might be able to make in the time I have. Some of these involve some new techniques I want to try and I will be sharing these with you along the way. I am also going to complete my son Ken’s quilt, and I do plan to enter that one into a show or two, but I want it home for the spring exhibit.

This will be a kind of departure from the direction I have been moving–away from shows and toward other avenues for sharing my work. I have become fairly puzzled by what is going on in the show quilting world recently. Last week two of my best quilts were rejected from Road to California, one of which has already won a ribbon and one that has already been shown in two AQS shows. I was encouraged by the Houston judging by what won. I did not enter this year, but in many, maybe even most, of the other shows the winners and losers have been an absolute puzzle to me. Some of the most exquisite quilts, beautifully designed and quilted, that might remotely be considered an art quilt did not do well, and the winners also seemed surprising.

So I have decided to concentrate on making my quilts equally as well as I would if they were a show quilt, and show or sell them as I can in other avenues, and to work also on my books and teach a few workshops locally. This decision already seems to have unlocked my creativity that felt like it was grinding to a slow halt. I’ll keep you up to date on that in case you are in the area and can come see my quilts or take one of my workshops. I will probably enter something in Houston for 2017, but we’ll see. I will take a new look at this situation after the exhibit or later.

Sew I am happily working away in my studio, perhaps at an even higher level than I have up until now, and we’ll see just how much of the ideas will actually make it on time.

Sew happy everyone. Follow your leanings in your quilting. If you don’t you may find it hard to work.

Part 4: Quilting for Domestic Machine Artists…Making Your Own Pattern

Posted on November 6, 2016November 14, 2016 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in A Little How-To, Art Quilt Techniques, Design Work, Software, Techniques, Tools / 2 Comments

chinese-bird-1

I make all the patterns of my designs myself for my own use. I do this using multiple programs on my computer and, even though I know many of you don’t have these programs, I thought it would be a good thing to provide you with some ideas on how this works, and maybe you can come up with your own solutions. For my purposes a “pattern” is a full sized print out of the design for my wall art quilts and either detailed measurements or block print outs or foundation paper printouts for utility (simpler and more traditional) quilts. I divide my quilting into two types, and each type has subcategories. This helps a lot in figuring out exactly how I need to approach making the pattern.

Wall Art Quilts (made at show quality level even if not entered into shows) are:
1. Quilts that cannot be washed or marked at all, such as deep space quilts
2. Quilts that I plan on washing and/or wet blocking, such as many of my pictorial, landscape, and line drawing quilts made in cotton.
3. Quilts that I may have prewashed the fabric and marked with erasable markers, but don’t think they could be washed when completed, such as my Ancient Manuscript series that has a lot of metallic painting and is often made in silks.
Utility/Snuggle Quilts…These quilts must all be washable, so I prewash all the fabrics and wash when complete.
1. Simple and quick quilts, such as lap/baby/wheelchair quilts I sometimes use for charity quilting or a seasonal throw in my home.
2. Somewhat more complicated quilts for using in my home or presents, but are for laps, beds, babies, pets, tables, etc…not intended for wall hangings.

For my utility/snuggle quilts, which are something I need to make quickly, I almost always design these in Electric Quilt 7. This is a wonderful program for making more traditional quilts. So I will just use the EQ7 block printouts and will also print a picture of the quilt in color and make notes by hand where I feel I need to. (I also use EQ7 for helping me design borders for some of my show quilts by placing design files in place like a photo). EQ7 provides not only the templates or measurements for all the pieces, it will also provide printouts for foundation paper piecing and tell you how much fabric you need for each color. I love EQ7. I sometimes cut these out with my Go! cutter, which makes it quick and accurate, and also provides some fun appliques to liven them up. Even so, I work out the plan in EQ7.

For my wall art quilts, I do a relatively complete design of how I want the quilt to look in my drawing software. This sometimes takes as long as constructing and quilting the quilt, or even longer, but it is both fun and worth it. I really love using Corel Painter and Corel Draw in concert for this purpose. These programs, together with my Wacom tablet, work something like painting or drawing with paper and pencil or brushes to come up with a really good idea of how the quilt will look.

It allows you to get the colors right, easily fix mistakes, check how the values work, change sizes of elements within the design without messing up everything else or having to start over, and “see” what the quilt will probably look like if you make it. If you work in layers, you can change the background if you don’t like it, move a tree from one side of the drawing to another, change the colors of the mountains, make the sky stormy if you started with sunny or vice-a-versa, play with angles and in Painter, there is even a Kaleidoscope function and a plethora of wonderful interesting brushes.

I am, right now, working on painting a whole quilt that I am planning on sending off to get a full size fabric print that I can then sandwich and quilt and embellish. So if you have design software, I encourage you to take the time to learn how to use it if you haven’t yet. I’m still learning.

However, when I started designing art quilts, I didn’t have these drawing packages and so I just sketched it out using pencil and paper, scanned it into the computer, and printed it out full size using Microsoft Excel. Excel will accept the changes of size you want, divide it into page-sized tiles that you can print, cut, and tape together. It’s a good system that nearly all my readers would be able to do even if they don’t have design software.

Working with Microsoft Excel to divide a pattern into tiles.

Then I added Corel Draw, Corel Painter, and Bernina design software. Bernina software not only allows you to digitize an embroidery design, but it uses a limited version of Corel Draw on the art canvas side. So if you have that, you have some design software. Corel Draw will help you draw some interesting pictures or use photographs for a basis, and will allow you to print your design in tiles in a very exacting way. You can even move the design around so the tiles split at more convenient places as needed.

Using Corel Draw to print into tiles

Also, you can print the pattern in black and white, which lets you see how the values work in a design and saves colored inks. Here is the first version of the design I made for Canterbury Knight.

Printsnap

And here is the quilt I made using the pattern above, but I changed the horse and castle to my own drawings rather than using the Dover ones I had in the original pattern (the horse above was the one used in an eleventh century illuminated manuscript, I just made it less oddly bent and showed a different style of horse and I changed the original castle a fair amount):

Canterbury Knight - F - 2015 web

Currently, I am playing with producing accurate PDF file patterns for some of my designs so I can share them.

Sew happy everyone! Draw a quilt design one way or another and print it out full size. Then you can make your quilt.

Part 3: Quilting for Domestic Machine Artists…Threads Can Make All the Difference

Posted on November 3, 2016November 15, 2016 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in A Little How-To, Design Work, Embroidery, Reviews, Threads / 4 Comments

Threads are an interesting, and sometimes a little touchy, subject among machine artists. Lots of us have our favorites and, like me, are what one might call “thread snobs”. So how do I view threads?

Thread sizes can be used to help with designs. I love doing line-drawing quilts, even though I haven’t done one lately. For one of my quilts “Perspective in Threads” I used four thread sizes to act like different sized strokes from different nibs on a drawing pen. I frequently use multiple thread sizes in my quilts.

Perspective in Threads This picture could really be a lot better! It is actually nicely squared up, but it doesn’t look like it here, and you can’t really see the contrasts as well as you can in person.

Dad’s House Plan. Largely a thread work quilt. All the landscaping is threadwork, as well as the plans in three different sizes of white threads.

So what do I use and how?

100 weight for microquilting, background work I want to more or less sink into the background, and couching down fat specialty threads. I also use this for machine stitched raw-edge applique and machine stitched turned-edge applique when I want the applique to stand out and not emphasize the edge.
60 weight polyester for most of my bobbin threads when I am quilting and appliqueing and some piecing.
50 weights for clothing construction and some piecing.
40 weight for machine embroidery and quilting when I want the quilting to show up. I have found that some 40 weight cottons, such as Superior’s, show up slightly larger than their polyester threads, and that can be used as an advantage when doing line-drawings.
30 weights for top stitching on clothing.
16 and 12 weight for heavy lines and when I really really want the quilting to show up.
Superior Thread’s light monopoly for really invisible stitch-in-the-ditch and some appliques.
Metallics for metallic needs.
Fat specialty threads for bobbin work and couching.

I have found that, for the most part, Superior Threads makes some of the best thread on the market, for almost all of the sized threads above. I have heard good things about Aurifil, though I mostly use Superior. I do use Gutterman, Mettler, and So-Fine 50 weights for clothing construction. And for 12 weights, I have tested several brands–though I haven’t tried Aurifil’s–and find that I get the best results from Sulky 12 weight from those I have tested. I tried Superior’s relatively new 12 weight. It’s beautiful, but it is slightly bigger than Sulky and it doesn’t stitch as well in my machines even when I use the largest needles. Sulky 12 weight seems to work just fine, but I’d like to test Aurifil’s.

Jenny Lyon’s recent blog post about testing some of the new threads good for microquilting does a great job of reviewing them, so I won’t review them here. But I strongly encourage you to go there and read her review.

I was interested to see that a fabulous line-drawing style quilt won a ribbon at Houston this week. Here’s a picture of that winning quilt.

Mikyung Jang of South Korea, winner of the $5,000 Superior Threads Master Award for Thread Artistry for the quilt "Suwon Hwasung."

In this year’s Houston IQF, Mikyung Jang of South Korea won the $5,000 Superior Threads Master Award for Thread Artistry for this quilt “Suwon Hwasung.”

Sew that really inspires me to try my hand at a new line drawing quilt. Her work is magnificent, and clearly quite a few cuts above what I have done so far…but I want to try one again. How about you?

Sew happy everyone! Try it! Get a solid color fabric, find a non-copyrighted line drawing you like or make one yourself, blow it up to full size (I will address simple pattern making for your own use in my next part of this), and mark it with Crayola washable markers…then sandwich and stitch away happily. Please, if you do this, share pictures with me at bettyjo@bjfabricartist.com even if it is only a practice piece. I would love to share your work here if you would like.