I treated myself today, and spent a little while machine quilting on a small quilt. Many of my projects these days are small-ish, and I’m really enjoying the machine quilting breaks that come along every few days. (If you’ve been following along, you’ll probably be able to figure out why most of my projects these days are on the small side… ) I’ve spent years making these huge, long and involved show quilts, where they take forever to piece, then forever to mark for quilting, and then when I finally get to the quilting part, it’s just so huge that it’s daunting. That’s not to say that it’s not enjoyable (mostly), but making smaller projects, where I can piece a little, mark a little, and then quilt the thing is just a really nice change.

And I do mean “treat myself” when I talk about machine quilting. It’s my favorite part of quilting, hands down. It’s just so cool to see a flat piece of fabric take on texture and dimension and life when it’s quilted. I love playing with all the cool threads I’ve collected over the years, like this variegated one:

Which looks like this when quilted:

How fun is this? For the curious, the thread is Superior Threads Rainbows, which is a Trilobal Polyester, 40wt., color #801, with 50 wt. Mettler Silk Finish in a blue that matches the fabric in the bobbin; the fabric is an old Nancy Crow design that looks like crushed suede, with a scene from a Laurel Burch Fanciful Felines panel; batting is Quilter’s Dream Poly Request Loft; the quilting stencil is the continuous line 4″ Dancing Flowers by Judy Allen.

Another thing I like about small quilts is that I can quickly pin-baste on the cutting table with flower head pins and they don’t get caught up in the free motion foot since the heads are flat against the quilt. With large quilts, I spend hours crawling around on the floor basting with the basting gun, and then I’m just wiped out for the rest of the day when it’s done. You can pin-baste just about anything up to a certain size, as long as it’s not so big that you become a human pincushion while trying to push it through the machine. Heck, if you’ve been sewing all your life and a few pinpricks don’t even faze you anymore, you could pin-baste even larger quilts this way.

I realize that not everyone feels this way about machine quilting, and some folks don’t find free motion quilting to be relaxing at all. So let’s have a chat about that, shall we? What don’t you like about machine quilting? What’s the part that you feel like you just can’t get right? If you do like machine quilting, and you have wisdom or a fabulous tip to share, let’s hear about that too!

I’m going to send a copy of the Machine Quilting—Master the Basics Workshop on CD to one lucky reader. To enter the drawing leave a comment on this post and share some of your machine quilting wisdom and great tips, or if you need help with machine quilting, leave a question that you’d like me to discuss in a future post. A winner will be chosen by random drawing this Saturday. Luck to all!

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While I’d rather be able to get everything I need locally at a decent price, it’s just not possible, so I shop online a lot. I used to shop a lot at Hancock’s of Paducah, but their shipping is kind of high depending on the size of your order, their “new and improved” website is dog slow and painful to use and calling to place an order isn’t always the most pleasant or easy experience either. Backorders have always been a problem with Hancocks as well, since they can never tell you when (or if) the backordered item might show up. I’ve shopped at Jinny Beyer’s site a few times over the years, but the last experience was soooo painful and required two phone calls and at least that many emails that I won’t do it again unless I’m desperate.

Lately I’ve discovered some new sites, some great, some not so good. I’ll list below some of my recent online shopping destinations (and some old faves) and my experiences with them, in no particular order:

Quilting Warehouse—I really like this place. The online shop is easy to use, well laid out, and has great prices from what I’ve seen so far. I discovered it while searching for the cheapest prices on fusible Velcro by the box. Not only are their prices good, they don’t kill you on shipping, and add nothing for handling at all. A small-to-medium box with two boxes of 15 feet of Velcro each, and two small packages of needles only cost $41.60 for product and $3.85 for shipping. They shipped my order within two days of receiving it, and it was in my hands in a week. Definitely a keeper.

eQuilter—Not that this is a recent find, and I’m sure you all have shopped here before. Great for fabric shopping, shipping costs are average, but it took them six days to ship my last order which was too long IMO. I do like their virtual design wall where I can see fabrics together before choosing which ones to buy. However, I wish that they would list the manufacturers names and style numbers with the fabrics in the shop, but that’s one of my giant pet peeves with many online fabric retailers. It would make it so much easier to shop for a certain fabric when you have that information in hand, if the shops would note it in the item name or description.

Amethyst Quilts—Not much to say about this place since my order never was completed. I was searching for a certain fabric and found it here through the Quilt Shops Search Engine, only to have the shop email me the day after I placed my order to say they didn’t have the fabric after all. Sad, very sad. That’s another of my huge pet peeves right there. Online shops that show fabrics and products that they don’t have in the store and don’t keep their stock levels current are really frustrating and definitely don’t inspire me to go back. The only thing is, it seems like all 210 online quilt shops that are designed and programmed by the folks that run the Search Engine look about the same; I might not even realize it if I ran across this same shop again a year down the road during another fabric hunt until after I’d placed my order for something else they might not have.

Thread and More—This one’s a mixed bag. The first time I ordered, my order was shipped the next day, and the shipping fee seemed average. The second time, it took them two weeks to ship my order out, and they charged me $7.99 shipping and $1.50 handling for a teeny tiny little Priority Mail box that cost them $4.80 to mail. The product total was only $19.92, so $7.99 was a bit steep to begin with but to add insult to injury, there was no “packaging” to speak of that would have cost them a huge amount of money or extra time. The four packages of finger cots and four packs of John James needles I ordered were inside a plastic zip top bag with the receipt, and the box was free from the Postal Service! I’m not too impressed with this place after the second go round.

Sewing Supply Warehouse—I can’t say enough good things about the service here. I buy Sulky thread from them, because they have the cheapest price that I’ve found on the ‘Net at $2.09 per spool. They ship orders out the next day for an average shipping cost without extra handling fees, and their online shop is powered by Yahoo!; nothing stellar, but very usable and gets the job done without glitches. The only complaint that I have is that they don’t carry more of the items that are on my “need to order” list. How simple life could be if they did.

Soft Expressions—I’ve been ordering from this site for years, so it’s not a recent find, but worthy of inclusion here. They have great prices, mostly much lower than retail and other sites. Timely shipping, usually just two days from order placement to shipment, with slightly lower than average shipping fees and no extra handling charges. The site is not laid out the best, but it is functional and gets the job done.

There you have it, almost all the online sites I’ve shopped at recently. I’m sure I’ve left out a couple of favorites that I’ve not visited recently. I can think of Red Rock Threads off the top of my head; always great service with extra reasonable shipping rates, probably some of the lowest in the business actually. I’m sure more sites will come to me as soon as I hit “Publish.”

Your Voice: Where do you turn when your LQS doesn’t have what you need for your latest quilting project? What are your favorite online shopping haunts, and how do they stack up when it comes to the real nitty gritty of it all with shipping times, costs and handling fees?

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…and in here. I think summer must get to everyone. Some of the blogs I read have gone quiet, or a bit slower anyway, and now it’s hit here too. It’s just too hot most days to be motivated to do much of anything! Adding in all the rest of the Life stuff means my productivity is taking a huge hit at the moment. I think I’ve composed quite a few posts in my head in the last week or so, none of which actually made it to a screen near you, and the rest of my quilting life is in no better shape!

I have been working on Inchies, slowly but surely, and I did make it to the Arts & Crafts store twice in two weeks, looking for fabric for the background quilt for the Inchies (it doesn’t hurt that the car is the only air conditioned place in my life right now). During one trip, there was a nice quilter in the shop who wanted to try hand quilting, and was looking for some hand quilting thread. The shop doesn’t even have any. How can you be a brick and mortar store that stocks quilting supplies without having even basic hand quilting thread of some kind in white and beige?

This quilter wasn’t getting much help from the sales person, who admitted she did everything by machine, so the quilter asked me what I thought about using any of the other threads they have in the store for hand quilting. I didn’t really have a clear answer for her on that one. I’ve never hand quilted with thread that wasn’t made for the purpose. I did remember that machine sewing thread is made with an opposite twist direction than hand sewing thread, since the machine will twist the thread further as it sews, which will increase the twist in a machine thread, but cause a hand sewing thread to untwist and eventually weaken and break.

I’m not sure if using a machine thread for hand work would do the same type of thing on some level, though I have used regular cotton machine sewing thread to appliqué or hand sew bindings down, and it twists and knots horribly, so maybe that can be attributed to the direction of the twist. I just can’t imagine trying to deal with knotting and twisting while you hand quilt though.

Anyway, I did what I could for this nice quilter in the shop, and gave her what other little helpful advice about hand quilting that I could on the fly since she’d never done it before. No, I don’t hand quilt anymore, but I did teach it for a while, so I at least have a few good tips. I can’t take credit however, for the very best tip about hand quilting ever. That one came from Kim DeCoste, Judy Murrah’s assistant with Quilts, Inc., when I worked at the Quilt Expo in Innsbruck, Austria in 1996. Yeah, I got to hobnob with the stars of the quilting world for a bit while I helped out in the Education Department, which Judy and Kim oversee.

Kim and I were standing around waiting to check participants in for a lecture, and chatting about quilting and our current projects. I was just starting the hand quilting on this project:

It was the first project I’d ever hand quilted, and I was fumbling around a lot and my stitches were large, crooked and uneven. Kim’s advice about hand quilting was this:

Start with a really big needle, like a size 9. Learn the rocking motion and work on getting the stitches even. Once your stitches are straight and even and rocking your needle is easy for you, then switch to a size 10 needle. Your stitches will automatically become smaller with the smaller needle. Wash, rinse, repeat, switching to a smaller and smaller needle until your stitches are the size you want.

To be honest, at the time I was doubtful. It just sounded too easy. But I went home after the Expo and tried it out, and Kim was right on the money. I hand quilted this 36″ square sampler quilt, and by the time I quilted the cables in the border, my quilting stitches were straight, even, and nearly 12 stitches to the inch. I wouldn’t enter a quilt show in the hand quilting category, because it’s still not that great, but it’s definitely more than passable, and I’m sure Kim’s tip helped me get to the “pretty good” stage faster.

I shared this tip with the quilter in the shop, and told her it was too bad she lived in the opposite direction from the shop that I did, since I’d have been happy to share a spool of real hand quilting thread with her if she wanted to come by. I’m probably never going to use it for anything again!

Your Voice: what’s your best hand quilting tip?? Share it!

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