I finally got around to quilting the Glimmer quilt I made sometime last year. This one was pieced with Carolyn Friedlander fabrics and I kept the colors subdued to greys and white with just a POP of the lime green.

I had done pillow sized and table topper sized versions of Glimmer but this was the first large version I had done. I wanted to make sure I really went wild with custom quilting on this.

Originally I had planned to do this on my domestic machine with lots of free motion quilting, but I loaded it up on the longarm once I had figured out the best way to start quilting.

Here’s an overview of the quilting I did:

In the background I just did allover swirls. The print is pretty busy for being black and white, so anything fancier would not show. It does create a great uniform overall texture in the background.

Then in each print I did a different free motion design.

Figure eights or L’s in the outermost rings, then ribbon candy. The next section is the green so I did a nice half leaf feathering thing. You could also call it serpentine, but it’s similar to doing feathers, except pointy. Some people refer to this as fern feathers.

The next section formed a V shape so I decided to treat both as a unit and did a swirled hook design that turned a corner. I picked this because it fit and because I’m not so good at it and needed the practise.

The inside ring I did close back and forth lines, also known as switchbacks. It’s a great dense fill and helps flatten the area, because in the inner ring I did feathers! Of course I did. I treated the edge of the block as the spine of the feather and bumped my way out from the center. Just travel back down the seam or around the block to get to the next one.

On the longarm I started at the top with the background fill and as I went back and forth I did each section as needed, even if it was a different motif. I did the whole thing in white 60w thread. This is so thin it sinks into almost any color.

For total quilting time, I did this over 3 days and my rough calculations were about 4 or 5 hours. One of those days I did hardly anything on it.

If you were going to do this same quilting on a domestic, I would do the stitch in the ditch around the main motif following the major seams first. Then I would start in the middle and do all the feathers. I would then do the next rung with the switchbacks. After that, I would likely do the next bits in quarters, travelling as needed to finish off the SID around the pieces and to get to the next sections. When the whole center motif was done, then I would start the background fill around the edges of the center and work my way out to the edges, also in quadrants.

If you have any questions, let me know!

Oh I have the best news – it took a while but it finally happened. We got word on a longarm, second hand and IN CANADA at a great price, in Canadian dollars.

Just to roll back a little, somewhere this winter my husband came into the sewing room and was watching mush and smush a queen sized quilt through my regular sewing machine. “That looks painful,” he said. “It is.” I said.

And he’d seen the basting process and how long it took.

It turns out, a longarm studio opened up in a community 2-3 hours away from me so I went up for a class. Worst case, I figured I would spend a few hundred in lessons and rental time but at least I’d get things done faster, even when including the long drive.

Ron was so interested after my first visit, I bought him along for my second visit and HE took the beginner class. He did great! And of course he was hooked too, so we started looking around. Then we got word and bit our fingernails and measured rooms and cleared out space and waited for it to get packed up and mailed all the way across the country.

(Canada is HUGE.)

This is our 2004 APQS Millie on a 12 foot table.

It got here just after our wedding anniversary in 8 large boxes, including a roll of batting we had tossed in our order. We spent two days setting it up.

We spent a few hours taking it apart and then putting it back correctly too.

Finally we were able to do some test runs and load our very first quilts. Then we quilted non stop, I swear. The first week the machine ran every single day. Some days we did two quilts, taking turns getting used to it, figuring things out, practising on the huge stack of my own quilt tops I had standing by to get done “some day.”

Eventually I put on the first customer quilt that had waited so patiently. And that bed sized tshirt quilt was done in 5.5 hours. It was amazing.

I can and DO finish customer quilts so much faster now. I had seven piled up. Three are already out the door to customers and two more are getting mailed out this week. It’s only been three weeks at this point.

I keep shaking my head and wondering why it took so long for us to make the jump but I guess it all happened at just the right time.

Ron and I are both quilting and right now I am catching up on customer quilts that were in the backlog. By June we should be ready to take on more quilts and do some machine quilting so all the quilters we know can get those tops done!

Well, I didn’t move my blog, I just moved my whole house, over a month ago. We’re still getting settled.

I think I lasted two whole weeks before I set my machine up a corner to sew something, anything, just because I needed to.
After a couple of location changes, I took over half of what will be our home office. The other half is the husband’s tools and things he needs to finish working on some parts of the house.

Did I mention the renovations? No? The house we bought is an old house, but with a new addition. The previous owners bought the place, started renos and ran out of money, then had to sell. Their loss, our gain I guess. All the hard and expensive stuff had been done, as far as we were concerned. We still had electrical and plumbing to finish, and there’s no trim anywhere, but we finally got enough done to move in.

Best part? I *WILL* have a dedicated sewing room some day, in the new basement. It is currently unfinished, just concrete. We even had to build the stairs to get down to it. so it will be a while before that is done, but it will be done to my specifications.

For now, I do have the most incredible view. That helps.