Orlando Pulse Heart Quilt: The longarm experience

So I've got this quilt top for the Orlando Pulse project, hearts in rainbow colors, not terribly creative but instructive as good practice.  I plan to get creative with the back, putting some of the pieces of shattered hearts on the back as well as creating a 49th heart to put on the back for the purposes of honoring the fact that 49 people died in the shooting.  And I had started using some of the white/background fabrics to do an improvisational pieced "floating squares" piece from the book The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters.  BUT the problem was that I'm new at longarm quilting and this was my first piece.  And my longerm teacher... Sue Sandritter at Quilt Trends in Columbus, Ohio, explained that having all those seams on the back of the quilt would make it more difficult. 

I was frustrated, because I was so sure this is how I wanted to make it work... but I could see ht epoint of not making my first longarm experience be frustrating, let alone something that would knock the whole machine off it's timing, so I decided to just do a flat back of white on white fabrics and then I could applique the special stuff on after the quilting was finished.  I'm VERY glad I did so. 

A longarm machine is specially made so that the quilter can fit the piece they're working on into the machine.  It's not something you've ever thought about if you've done just seamstressing, because mostly in seamstressing, you are working on a seam or edge of a piece, the rest of it sits to the side while you only have to have a flat 5/8 inch piece of fabric on the inside under the arm of the machine.  RARELY in dressmaking will you have to find a way to create a seam in the middle of the piece, so that half of the fabric needs to pass through the machine between the needle & the arm, and even if there is such a moment when you're doing it, the fact that it's a dress or jacket or suit means that the amount of fabric is very minimal in comparison to a large bedspread that has fabric, batting, then more fabric in the finished piece.  Sewing those little lines in the middle of the piece becomes an exercise in wrestling your excess fabric & batting into the small space that the arm of your machine has... And if you think perhaps maybe it's possible to just work around the edges and only up to the point where the sewing machine will take you, and leave the rest "puffy", like a TA-DAAAAA, it's the focal point anyways, right?  Well... if you want your quilt to be USED, then you don't want the three parts of it... top, batting & bottom, to be shifting around & bunching up because you didn't sew it all together.  Believe me, I thought of it, but it doesn't work.  You will end up with an uncomfortable lump of batting that moves around in the middle of your unstitched area of quilt.

The batting you choose will determine how far away you are allowed to upt your quilt lines, and each one will be rated for a certain amount of space between the lines.  Some will be 3 inches, others will be 5 or 7 inches... What this means is that the batting you have chosen is intended to be able to stay relatively flat and NOT bunch up, so long as you attach it at least THAT often. 

The problem with most quilt patterns ... and this is kind of a joke among experienced quilters... is that they're very specific about their instructions on how to piece together the patchwork of their tops... but they rarely explain the quilting details that will turn your quilt into a happy piece of art for your home.  They joke is that nearly every quilting pattern ends with the instruction, "Quilt as desired". 

For those of us who LOVE the detail of the little lines of stitching that go through a coverlet, who sigh over a focal point that was allowed to be puffy and un-stitched, that was NOT a focal point until some skilled quilter chose to quilt around it rather than through it... for THOSE of us who are mesmerized by the fact that a spot of matchstick quilting can create a stiffer spot and a lot of little pebbles can become a design element of their own in our art... the thought that the last words of most patterns are "quilt as desired", is just frustrating as heck! 

SO I decided to learn more about the task of finishing up all these UFOs (UnFinished Objects) and WIPs (Works In Progress), in a more artful way.  This summer I took formal classes, in person, not just watching YouTube videos online (not to diss that, but seriously, there is a difference between a sewing class where someone can see exactly where you are placing your hands and tell you how to turn your wrist JUST A BIT and it'll work better... or where the teacher allows you to borrow her gloves so you can see how they work ON YOUR HANDS, before you decide whether you want to buy them or not... ).  I took classes in hand quilting, machine quilting, and also longarm quilting. 

In the hand quilting class, my seamstressing and embroidery experience translated nearly perfectly.  The tasks are very similar and the real value to the class is to learn the specific techniques helpful in the quilting process, as well as review the various pieces of equipment that you can use to create your artwork and to design your stitching lines before you're putting the needle into it.  I had a chance to check out different thimbles, see why a smaller length of thread works (I kind of instinctively knew this from how many hems I've handsewn and how many bodice linings I've hand tacked... but having someone confirm for me that it's easier to work with shorter lengths of thread despite having to knot it more often and bury threads & etc, was a good thing)... I learned how to knot and bury the thread in a way that does not happen in embroidery, needlepoint or garment sewing, and I got to practice the new techniques in front of a teacher. 

In the machine quilting class I learned how to move the fabric under the needle to create a design, and how to make allover designs like meandering, shells and curlicues, so that no one would be able to point out a beginning or end of the pattern, and the general principle that one doesn't want blocks of an allover pattern that would allow for a channel of puffed batting... no, one needs to vary the stop & start point so that the meander or allover pattern will not create an obvious seam line or stop point. 

But in the longarm class, I learned how the physical task of pushing the machine around on rollers over the quilt uses much less muscle strength than the task of moving the entire quilt around under the needle on a stationary machine.  I learned that the task of creating the design feels more intuitive, like driving or using a computer mouse, than the task of creating the design by moving the fabric under the needle.  I also learned that the task requires endurance... particularly if you're going to be doing it all in one session like I did on this one.  And when you're renting a machine, you NEED to work start to finish without taking it off the machine, so you're kind of stuck... and it IS an endurance exercise.  For this one, it took about half an hour to clean & load the machine (my first time), and 3 FULL hours of quilting... meaning I spent 3 & 1/2 hours just standing... reaching out over the machine rails to replace the needle once, reaching out to move the machine around, the bars that the quilt is rolled onto are not intended as grab bars or leaning bars, so there is no opportunity to lean against the machine and take the pressure off the bottom of your heels, it's JUST a bunch of standing. 

Aleve helps.  As does a good podiatrist.  I'm blessed with good foot doctors, cursed with poor foot mechanics.  As a tall girl who danced on toe shoes too early in life, I now have flat feet which over-stretch my plantar facia tendon when I'm standing up... If I don't move, I eventually am in pain (which makes tasks like following a tour group and standing around listening to a lecture difficult, also).  I can walk, hike, bike... but standing it ROUGH.  And after nearly 4 hours of it on the day I did this quilt, I know that I'll be looking for a rolling architects' stool that I can raise & lower to accommodate the height of the machine... BUT...

It's SO worth it.  FUN... like ... I can't describe.  Like being handed a great big piece of paper and a crayon and having your teacher say... DOODLE....

SO... here's how it went.  I want you to see the top left edge of this quilt. 

Notice that the batting, the fluffy part, extends out past the quilt top.  The backing is under the batting and ALSO extends out past the top.  You never want to be quilting and find yourself out of backing before you're out of top.  It's assumed that you've FINISHED the top and aren't intending to cut it down, so they suggest 3-4 inches extra on each side.  On THIS side, I did way more than 3 inches extra because another helpful thing is to bring along some of your fabric to put on top of the batting and use as a way to test out the tension of the stitches if you change out the needle and every time you change out the bobbin.  If you do it right the first time, in theory it won't need to be adjusted, but there's always the possibility that you ran the thread through slightly differently or that as you stitch it, things even out in a different direction than your original tension needed, but for sure you need to fix it when you first start.  WHY?  Well... there are two threads, one coming from the top and one coming from the bottom.  If the top is too tight (too tense) then it will drag each bottom stitch up through the three layers and you'll see the bottom thread on top.  Then when the top is finished, the top thread (no longer under the tension of the machine) will simply lay on top of your quilt and your bottom thread is doing all the work of keeping the three layers together.  If the bottom thread is too tense, you've got the same problem on the back of your quilt.  You need them to be equally tense, so that the loop where the top thread twists through the bottom one and locks them both, that point is buried in the middle layer and is not pulled either up to the top or dragged down to the bottom by uneven tension.  Laying a piece of extra fabric along the side of your quilt, on top of YOUR batting, will help adjust the machine to YOUR quilt, with YOUR choice of fabric for backing, YOUR fabric for the top, and of course YOUR particular batting.  The person before you on the machine might have been sewing through blue jean fabric, or fluffy minky, or silk... or linen... each of which presents a different issue for the tension of the top versus the bottom... so taking care to adjust the tension to YOUR quilt goes a long way to making the whole task easier. 

The next thing is to go to town on figuring out what design to use.  MY hearts were JUST the size requested by the Orlando Modern Quilt Guild, so I didn't put a border on them, which meant I needed to start my pattern for the main quilt, right from the very first stitch.  I tried a few little loopy leafs on the top edge, but I couldn't get them evenly spaced in that small area, so I gave that part up.  I had always intended to do a dense quilt for the white background portions of this quilt, and make hearts in the center, not perfect (these hearts represent real people, and real people are never perfect, are we?) so I didn't need to try to draw them on first. 

I used the idea of a maze... or a greek key design to create my hearts within the hearts.  I was going to start with the bottom left of every heart, and make a single smaller heart inside that one, then I'd turn and head back out of the maze.  In the white spaces, I found that little loops were easiest to create and make fill the oddly shaped triangles of white between the hearts... I've drawn a greek key border design, as well as a spiral maze.  And then on top of both, the heart that I ended up with... with arrows so you can see the direction that I would go on any of these. 

And the final quilt.  See the top of this post for the entire thing, but I wanted to highlight a portion of the quilting so you can see how even when done freehand, the hearts tended to turn out uniform ENOUGH, and quite charming in their imperfections. 

Yeah... Sorry... Sophie happened to decide this quilt needed a little test ride to make sure it was soft enough.  And she sat right on the part that was flattest, but you can see from around here... the little un-quilted middles of the hearts are puffy, the loops on the irregular white background managed to do quite well in filling up those spaces... and my first longarm experience was a WILD success... Next step.  Put the 49th heart onto the back, add a label, cut off the edges, bind & send.  (sounds like a whole lot more work than it is... THIS is the part where you know it's finished and those last few details will make it a working quilt.)  YIPPEE!