Gridwork on a Charity Quilt

Have not completely finished my baby quilt, however the binding is on and it just needs to be handstitched to the back.

Was itching to stitch so I made a start on the pile of charity quilts I have sitting here. First one I picked up is a cute ballerina panel quilt in pastel pink tones. Decided to try a new thread on this that I purchased at the last quilt show. It is 50wt Konfetti from Wonderfil threads. 

Now when trialling new thread I go by what experience has taught me over the years. This thread is different to Aurifil 50/2 thread in that it is thicker and feels more cottony, so I assumed it was 50/3 thread. In fact it felt very much like the Mettler thread cone I used for the last few charity quilts. So I decided to use the Mettler setting (i.e. tension and speed) that I kept on my machine for this thread and no surprise, it was just about right. Also used this thread on the bobbin which turned out to be a bit of a hassle in terms of the tie offs. On my machine which is a Bernina Q20, I have a programmable tie off function.

It is set to something like 4 or 5 stitches before you start off. With Aurifil 50/2 that gives me a very neat tie off. With this thread it was more like a horrendous knot...very unsightly and hard to digest. Absolutely a nightmare to bury in your quilt. Tried different ways to counter-act this, i.e. starting off carefully in Manual, making a few stitches on the spot and then taking off in Regulated mode but still, the thread kept making these unsightly knots. This slowed me down there for a while...in the end I used the Manual mode to start off with some very small stitches and then moving over to the Regulated mode. I think if this was my own quilt I was quilting I would put something like Decobob in the bobbin which is an 80 wt thread...I think the knotting issue would be far less. Anyway, I have a whole cone of this so I continued with it, as the stitching looked fine otherwise and one big plus...this thread has absolutely no lint!

For the ballerina quilt I initially decided to do the center panel in a meander and then do some ruler work in the borders, however I did not really like that idea. The problem with the charity quilts is that I cannot really mark them a lot other than using a bit of chalk. The fabric is likely not pre-washed and getting rid of the blue marker with water could lead to disasters (think colour run). Maybe not so relevant in this pink quilt but it is also winter over here, so I would have problems getting that dried in a hurry.

Looking at it I thought a grid would look nice over the ballerinas. Have not done this on the sitdown machine before over an entire quilt, so that was going to be a good challenge. Now, if this was my own quilt, I would definitely pre-mark this before basting and then just follow my lines but that was not an option here. So I needed to come up with something different. In the end I used masking tape.

Found the center of the panel first. I did not trust the straightness of the panel, so that is why I did not start in the corners. Maybe it would have been fine, but I don't know...could not think that through. Started in the center and did my 45 degree angle from there. Put two lines in for good maesure to see how accurate I would end up after the first line because I did this after the quilt sandwich was all put together and this has a puffy wool batting, so I was not quite confident that this would work out. Did the first two lines and it did look alright, so I continued without the tape basing every subsequent line on the previous one, going very slowly with carefully aligning my ruler. I used the Handiquilter straight line ruler for this which is about 9 in long, so it was bit by bit, moving the ruler along, following the previous line. I made the lines 2 in apart to match the pieced second border. Was not that confident that it would turn out accurately when I started the crosshatch as I had to move a fair amount of quilt around on the diagonal with a fair amount of puff from the wool batting. Aligned my straight ruler on the previous lines but also used some additional 45 degree lines to keep the angle as consistent as I could. But wow...to my surprise, it turned out brilliantly

Even measured the squares...yep, more or less 2in, looking nice and square. Not that it matters that much if it was out a bit but I was expecting much more inaccuracy. Now to that checkerboard border. Will put some curves in there and finish off the outer border with a bit of a scallop. Still undecided whether I will quilt the smaller 1-1/2in borders down or leave them unquilted.

This, of course, is all taking a bit longer than anticipated, but I felt a bit like experimenting. For a kid's quilt this is quite long and larger than usual. Given that this worked out well, a simple grid is a really good option for a smallish baby quilt. Definitely will do this again.

Karin

Gridwork

Finished one of the Lemurs

This was the second go...I had the grid wrongly aligned first time around and some of the lines fell exactly on the seams around the eyes. Begrudgingly changed this and stitched the lines half inch away from the original marked in grid. I just could not help myself...this would have bothered me for years to come. This was easy to do with a straight ruler as I just shifted the ruler over. Luckily I marked those lines very carefully for a change so this turned out quite nice. I am using the Stitch Regulator of the Capri for this which is going really well...feel that I am stitching much faster with the regulator, so the whole thing is not that arduous to complete.

Only have half the other lemur left to finish. Looking forward to the FMQ in the background.

Karin

WIP: Wholecloth - Gridwork

I have been working away on my Wholecloth from Cindy Needham's Craftsy class 'Machine Quilting Wholecloth Quilts'.

This has been somewhat of an adventure with certain new revelations, i.e. I am a very messy marker and I also tend to mark/stitch first - think later. Several mishaps happened with the marking which meant I had to dampen some areas to get rid of some lines and yes, of course, that wiped some of my other lines...the whole thing looks fairly messy. However, I am doing this project just for fun and to further try out Cindy's  Ultimate Background Stencil Collection that I purchased for Christmas.

I did baste the way Cindy suggested by stitching a loose grid over the whole area and that worked great, however I will have to remember to stitch that in a different colour. As I was quilting along at times, I took some of the basting stitches out in order not to stitch over them and later discovered that I had also hacked into some of my gridlines by accident, hence had to re-stitch several lines!

Anyway, today I want to illustrate how easy it is to get something wrong. I was wanting to put a 1/2in grid into the central flower shape and marked this out nicely before basting. I thought I had paid attention to marking this grid on a 45 degree angle, however discovered a few days ago that I did exactly the opposite...I aligned the grid on the horizontal lines...

I even stitched this out before noticing...looking at it, I thought...wait a minute, this does not look right. Yep, sure enough...nice and horizontal. I think Cindy remarked in her class that this just does not look that good and looking at this, I could really see the difference this makes...

Lucky for me this was a small and defined area, so I went over my blue lines with the purple Air Erasable marker to put the grid on a 45 degree angle

Have a look at the difference

Looks much better.

At the moment I am working hard on being able to give this a once over spray with water...however I can only do that if all the major elements are stitched down. I did extend this Wholecloth and added a feather border...haha!...only to realise after basting that I had put my stencil the other way around which did not work that great with the corner motif.  So again I will use my Air Erasable marker and go over that to mark the spine in the right way, stitch it out and then finally spray this thing to get rid of the bulk of the blue markings as the general mess of the blue (and purple) lines is very distracting.

Remains to be seen how this will turn out

Linking up to Let's Bee Social over at Lorna's blog Sew Fresh Quilts.

Karin