Tag Archives: Jen18

Long Arm Quilting: #18 Jen – Some Hard Lessons

So first, I want to thank Jen for being brave and being the first quilt to be a practice piece.  While I never wanted any of my practice pieces to look like they were practice pieces, well… let’s just say I learned a LOT about quilting while working on Jen’s quilt.  And although hers is finished, I wanted to share the lessons & insights first and let the finished quilt stand alone in its own post. First, let’s discuss the whole squaring process and why quilt backs need to be so much larger than the quilt top, because there are several reasons for this. I showed in the last post how the quilt gets loaded onto the three poles.  The quilt backing gets basted to zippers at the top and bottom and rolled straight & square onto two poles.  Then,the batting gets put on top of the backing and “floats” – the batting isn’t connected to anything at the top or bottom.  Lastly, the quilt top gets loaded onto a zipper at the bottom of the quilt and rolled onto the 3rd pole. To get a good start, first I have to make sure everything is straight and stays straight throughout the quilting.  So I have to do something at the top of the quilt to make sure it’s straight and keep my batting from “creeping”.  The only way I know something is absolutely straight is if I lock my machine into a position so that it can only move in one direction.  This is called a “channel lock”.  In this case, I need a straight horizontal line right across the top of the quilt.  Here, I actually baste the horizontal line across the backing & batting ONLY. You can see a bit of that horizontal line peeking out in this photo:Now, here’s where you can see why we need extra fabric for the backing at the top.  You need room for the pole, room for the zippers and pins, and room for the basting line.  You don’t want to accidentally stitch the zipper or heaven forbid run over a pin, so you need a few inches to maneuver. Once the horizontal line is there, then I pull up the quilt top and align it with this row of stitching.  So I can see if the quilt top has any extra “give” in it, and try to ease that in while I’m basting the top.  Once the pinning is done, I keep the machine locked and baste the quilt top to the backing and batting, about 1/8″ from the edge.  This stitching actually helps you to finish the binding too, because the border is already secure and your binding will hide this row of stitching. With the top basted, now I need to baste the sides.  The sides only get basted as far as the machine will reach, which for me is about 22″. In this case, the machine is “channel locked” in the other direction, so that it will only stitch a vertical line. Do you see in this photo the three clamps on the side, clamped to a paint stick?  This is called side tension: You want to make sure the backing is taut (not super tight, but you don’t want to quilt puckers in the back either!)  This is one reason why we need extra backing on the sides.  One, we need room for the clamps, and we need to be able to move the machine all the way to the edge of the quilt without running into the clamps.  Also, if I am doing “ruler work” (more on that someday) there’s actually an extension table that goes on the machine, and the extra backing means I won’t run the table into the clamps either. However, I use extra backing for an additional reason: to test the machine tension. It never fails on a long arm machine, tension is something that must be constantly checked and adjusted.  The tension changes as the bobbin runs out of thread; the tension changes when you wind a new bobbin; the tension changes if you use different threads top & bottom.  I learned this lesson a little while ago but it bears repeating: always check the tension before putting a single stitch into a quilt.  Do you want this type of stitching on your quilt?  If not, you’ll help your long arm quilter immensely by providing them some room to work by way of extra batting & backing on the sides.  Then they can test the tension on your project, with your fabric & batting & thread choices.  The tension testing is more extensive when first starting a quilt, and I usually do curves first because that’s where terrible tension will show the most.  Once I get going, I don’t need to test it as much, and you can salvage much of the extra fabric on the sides if you are so inclined. I set the bobbin tension first, and I use what’s called a TOWA gauge to do that.  This is so that I can always get the bobbin thread to a consistent setting that my machine likes.  Over time, I’m discovering that my machine seems to love a TOWA tension of around 150.  The bobbin tension is such a sensitive thing – the smallest changes in the position of that little screw shows up really big on the TOWA gauge.  This is how much thread I spooled off to check the tension! That’s quite a little pile, eh?  Once I get better at it, I hope to not use as much thread checking the bobbin tension.  Once the bobbin is set, it’s just a matter of setting the top tension to get rid of loops and pokies. Tighter if the top thread shows underneath, looser if the bobbin thread shows on top.  It’s a balancing act for sure! When you come to the bottom of the quilt, you actually need to baste the bottom before you do the final pass of quilting.  What I do is pin the bottom with pins, then I take off the zipper: This is really the final proof of whether the quilt is going to finish off square.  The quilt is under tension here, being pinned to the zipper, and you don’t want to remove that tension until you have it secured another way.  So I use flat headed pins to pin the quilt top and keep it from relaxing into the wrong shape.  Once those pins are secure, I unpin the zipper and roll the leader out of the way.  This is where having extra backing at the bottom is helpful – you can’t guarantee how much a quilt will shift or grow or shrink while it’s being quilted – there are a lot of variables. So it’s best to have a little extra to work with at the bottom, plus – just like at the top, you need room for the machine to move so that it doesn’t hit a pin or run over the zipper on the backing. To quilt Jen’s quilt, I took my inspiration from each block, and I decided to do a different pattern in each block, and then have the designs flow into one another.  In hindsight, I think I would have been better off choosing one or two patterns instead of six, and some of the patterns worked out better than others. Overall, I like the blue thread I chose, but I think actually it would have looked better with maybe a medium brown.  That way it wouldn’t be such a start contrast against the lighter areas of the block (and maybe would have hidden my bobbles a little better!) Speaking of bobbles… I never should stay away from my machine that long.  I should be quilting something every day, even if I can only get 15 minutes.  You lose your rhythm so fast, and it takes a while to get back into the groove.  I think you can probably look at Jen’s quilt and see what block and did first & which one is last. So I’ll post her quilt later on tonight, and we’ve got a guild meeting coming up soon so she’ll get her quilt back in a couple of weeks.  I hope she is OK with how it turned out; I don’t claim it to be my best work, but I am ever so thankful that Jen trusted me with finishing it. To endless possibilities, Ebony

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