I've been working on a denyse schmidt quilt which I turned into a king size for a while now. Each row of squares added, and each border sewed on added to the bulk of the quilt and exasperated the difficulty of working with such a large (102" x 93") size on my tiny little sewing table with my small machine. I made an appointment a while back at a long arm quilter in kitchener where you pay 150$ to rent the machine for a day which includes a lesson. The lady told me the day would be enough time to get a whole king size quilt done, and she was right! I started at 10:30 am and was done by 3:30pm. And from now on, the machine is only 50$ a day to rent, now that i've had my lesson.
For machine quilting I had to sew on an extra border (a leader) of 8 inches which made the quilt even BIGGER! I'm not completely certain my quilt was totally square after i put the leaders on, i think they were a little off. The first thing you do on a machine quilter after you load all the layers onto their respective bars and pin everything is to lock in a horizontal, and since you pin your leaders on, they must be square as well. I wanted to do just plain diagonal quilt lines, but not being completely sure if my leaders were square, i was afraid the lines would go super wonky, so i picked a more organic pattern and decided to do some freeform machine quilting in the spaces.
the long arm quilter doing it's thing:
The whole process was pretty fun, and encouraging as at the end of piecing the top i was getting pretty discouraged and frustrated with the size. I love that you can machine quilt it in one day! Now I have to do the binding, and the lady at the quilt shop suggested cutting, ironing and mitering the extra backing into binding which is a great idea! First though I have to rip off all of the leader stitch by stich. blah.
I love it, how cool are you? I have a quilt at a friend of my moms that is in the process of being long armed, but how much more exciting and gratifying doing it yourself. How much choice were you given for thread colour and quilting pattern?
ReplyDeletehey lady!
ReplyDeleteThis place was pretty neat. The lady was there the whole time to help me if
i had any issues, but left me alone to quilt if i was doing fine. You can literally choose anything. There's craploads of preset designs, which the machine figures out how to scale once it knows your dimensions, or you can turn self scale off and do some figuring out. You can do straight lines, diagonal, meandering, anything really. I avoided doing straight lines, because once you place your quilt on, and lock in a horizontal on the machine, if the quilt goes off square a bit, then straight lines will go wonky which will be more obvious than an organic pattern. I picked a leaf pattern, which sounds totally cheese, but I chose a pretty subtle thread, so you don't really notice. Then since there were spaces, I got to grab those handles and do a bit of freeform too! Next time you have a big enough quilt, you should try it out there!!
you can also choose any colour thread.. and she gives you 4 bobbins included in the 150$ so you can go back and take the bobbins i guess. she also has king size batting there if you dont' want to get it before hand.
ReplyDeleteThe leaf pattern is nice, it looks simple and swirly. I chose a cloud pattern, it's similar. And I totally would go there but Kitchener? I wonder if there are places in Tdot that offer this service. I have a quilt guild meet up on Sunday, they might know.
ReplyDeleteWow! That is amazing
ReplyDeleteCaitlin... I bet there's places like this in toronto for sure! :) Cloud pattern sounds awesome, I can't wait to see pictures!
ReplyDelete