Here is how the adorable pantograph "Meandering Daisy" is working itself out on my customer's giant, refreshingly scrappy king-sized quilt. She requested simple white thread on top, so of course I chose the tried-and-true Aurifil 50 wt. in #2021. This color of white thread is not the shocking bright white, but a more delicate white. Using this top thread gave me the perfect opportunity to use my Magna-Glide Classic prewound bobbins, another tried-and-true product I love. Since these are white, but the backing is black, I was concerned about a white bobbin being too busy on the back. But my customer assured me that she would like to see the white daisy pattern on the black backing fabric, so I racked it all up and got one row done before dinner last night. 

This quilt is approximately 108" square. So the first pass took me about 50 minutes to complete. The design is wide, about 10 inches I guess, so it covers a large area with each pass. Today my goal is to try to complete each pass quicker, while maintaining the beauty and flow of the stitches. 

Longarm quilters do more than tame quilts. We tame batting. This king-sized quilt of course come with king-sized batting. Every packaged batting comes out of the bag looking somewhat like this:

There are hard-pressed kinks throughout. These must be tamed before racking up the quilt or else these creases will be permanently quilted into the quilt. And that's not good! I've picked out a few of these mistakes in my 5 years of longarming. So I decided a few months ago that I would always press the batting before I rack it up.

Pressing a football-field of batting on my ironing board is not good for business. It's a time stealer, and it picks up every single stray thread known to man. Even when I vacuum first. So I press the entire batting on my longarm after I've pinned on the quilt top and the backing fabric to the leaders.

Here is how the king-sized creases looked before pressing:

Because the batting so long, I fold it up on itself and let it hang close to the floor:

I slowly run my iron vertically across the batting wall, steaming generously all the way. This uses a lot of water. I barely put pressure on the batting, because the steam is doing all the work.

This is how it looks when I'm done:

I pull it up about 12 more inches to press out the fold at the bottom, repeat the pressing process on the inner wall of batting, and then it's ready to be loaded onto the frame. The batting hangs nicely with no creases:

And the excess is folded up from behind the machine, so it can feed evenly when I roll the quilt:

Now I'm going back into the studio to dust off this frame...

I finished this adorable quilt yesterday, at around dinner time. Which reminded me to get the chicken breasts out of the freezer.

Every angle of this quilt has something cute to look at. Several people made their own versions of chicken blocks. Proving once again that scrappy, group quilts have a unique spot in quilting culture.

The main yellow chicken had flaps for "arms" (?) and a flap for a beak. In order to stitch a pantograph around these cute elements, I had to pin them back out of the way on one pass, and then pin them back down for the other pass.

My customer gave me permission to quilt on top of all the applique in this quilt. But it was not possible to quilt on top of the flaps. The tops of the flaps were also 3-dimensional and would've gotten caught on my quilting foot.

Undaunted, I pinned and unpinned. Marked my plastic pantograph cover to keep me away from the flaps. Started and stopped. And tied and buried all of the threads into the quilt.

My goal was to make the quilting design move smoothly through the chicken.

I knew I wanted to use a yellow-gold thread for this on the front, and I really wanted to use a variegated cotton. So I chose a very softly variegated Aurifil 50 wt. #3920. The backing was mostly green, so I paired up my top thread with Aurifil 50 wt. variegated greens #3320  in the bobbin. These are so barely variegated as to look solid. But when they're quilted the subtle tones show up. In the above picture, you can click on it and see the tones of thread moving across the dark green fabric.

The backing had a centerpiece of orphan blocks pieced together.

Today I have a king-sized beauty getting ready to be loaded onto the frame. It was pieced conventionally, with pre-cut squares. My customer has an eye for color, and has purposefully arranged every single block in this huge quilt. My studio is not big enough to showcase the entire quilt. But when it is completed I will attempt to lay it out to show the movement in color. 

The backing is a very rich black floral. I'll be auditioning bobbin threads that will not overwhelm the back, yet not poke up through and show on top. This is always a challenge in the longarm quilting world!

There's nothing like a colorful, Funky Chicken block swap quilt to add some much-needed humor to my studio!

This cute baby quilt is up next for a pantograph treatment. My customer has suggested either "Simply"or "Raindrops" because of their openness and simplicity. There are a couple of 3D elements that will need to be fused down before I can quilt it.

The Funky Chicken quilt will be donated to a maternity hospital, in lieu of a wedding gift according to the new bride and groom's wishes - which is such a wonderful idea!

Today I had to get moving on my version of Deb Karasik's "Phat Tuesday" paper-pieced quilt. I completed the 8 melon wedges and then made one of the 8 spiked arcs just to see if I liked the fabric combination. Then, it was on to the remaining 7 arcs which I have trained myself to do via assembly line. I'm so spoiled by chain-piecing that I won't even make a quilt unless I can figure out how to chain piece the whole thing.

Here I've stacked up all 7 arcs, which have been started already, and they're ready for the next step:

I flipped all of the papers over and then one-by-one pressed open the newest spike with my Clover mini iron:

When I finished all 7 of those, I flipped them back over and folded back the next spike line on each. Revealing the back side of the newest fabric:

I used my acrylic ruler to trim this new fabric to a quarter-inch from the paper:

I did that 6 more times, and stacked them up for the next step:

Next comes the orange fabric - right side up:

Here is how the orange fabric is placed under the newest cut line of the last spike. I let a little bit of the fabric peek out so you can see how it is positioned:

I flipped the paper back over to cover this new joined pair, which you can see through the paper below:

Here is how the production line looked at this point:

I stitched on the solid line, just like I'm supposed to, on each of the 7 waiting arcs. After stitching one, I grabbed the next one on the stack, added an orange fabric right side up, opened out the paper, and fed it into the machine:

Until all 7 were completed exactly the same way. They're all still connected here:

That's it! Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Ten more times! 

If it weren't for Valorie Wells, I would never have made my first New York Beauty block. She inspired me to make my "Susanna" quilt. Her book Radiant New York Beauties has been indispensable to me. I've referred to her instructions so many times, even when I've used other designers' patterns. That's because her paper-piecing diagrams are clear and easy to understand. This page is always open in my studio:

I'll play with my Phat Tuesday quilt tonight, and then it's on to Funky Chickens in the morning!

This Quilt of Valor, being large and green, deserved the leafy pantograph "Lush Leaves" by Lorien Quilting.

This pantograph is really easy. It's deceivingly dense, though, and it took about 15 minutes to do a 79" row. I found myself getting a bit bored. It consists only of curves leading to points. So I got a rhythm in my head, and kept reminding myself to "aim for the points". 

The golden fabrics tipped me off to using a shiny gold Isacord embroidery thread #0731 on top, and on the muslin backing I used Magna-Quilt cotton prewound bobbins, Khaki #24525. These 2 would not play nice at first, and I ended up ripping out stitches.

So, I rethreaded the Isacord so that it only went around my white rotary tension disc halfway. Just like on a sewing machine. Then, I loosened the tension on the black disc tensioner way back until the black nut almost came off. The thread was still really giving me resistance, but I knew it couldn't get any looser. 

Then, I tightened my bobbin so that the bobbin thread gave just the slightest resistance when I pulled it for a few inches. 

I popped in a 3.5 needle, set the SPI to 10 and everything was perfect! 

So what did I do wrong in the beginning? My thread, bobbin, needle and tension adjustments were working fine on the previous quilt. I am blaming the muslin backing fabric for this one. I remember when I used some of it to make a stitching sample awhile back. I almost threw in the towel on this business thinking my machine had finally beaten me. And then, I put on a small piece of shot cotton and the stitching was absolutely perfect. 

This QOV is quite large, so it will have to be completed another day. 

Tomorrow is another quiltmaking class. My 2 newest students are almost done with their Log Cabin blocks. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and I keep longing to finish my own quilts. 

Last October I was privileged to teach my first quiltmaking class to this lovely young lady, above. Her thrill for the fabric hunt was my first clue that she'd love making quilts.

She finished her masterpiece the first week of December, just in time for the Christmas/New Year fray. I wrote out some very primitive instructions on how to shop for the backing, and told her to let me know when she was ready to learn how to quilt it.

Today, as Spring is finally pretending to be here, my student and I reunited for the big finish. Her backing was a perfect flannel from Westminster Fabrics. It was exactly the size I asked her to get.

Here is my student quilting her quilt, using the pantograph "Daisy Chain" by Patricia Ritter. Notice what a good student she is - her left hand is gently guiding the handle and not gripping it tightly. Just like I told her! From the minute she took hold of my machine, she was relaxed.

Here is her finished quilt. We were both giddy about how cute it turned out...

Her final lesson will be to prepare and attach the binding. Her first quilt will be checked off the list of Things To Do, and she'll be on to her second quilt. And the Quilting World will have yet another convert!

It's funny how a pantograph can add another dimension to a quilt. This quilt has Delectable Mountains blocks surrounding a panel of cowboy fabric. The spikey appearance and color choices really show up on this quilt at first sight.

But if you begin to look closer, you can see elements of quilting - such as a cowboy hat.

And, closer...

Although red doesn't photograph well in my studio, I had to show this boot...

And, this saddle. Accompanied by random loops on the back...

Which caused me to give my customer a 10% discount on machine quilting. These loops are costing me money, and there is no reasonable explanation for them. All of the thread and bobbin combinations which have been working wonderfully for me have begun to act up randomly.

On this quilt I used Aurifil 40 wt. cotton #5001, with Magna-Quilt 50 wt. cotton prewound bobbins #24525. I used a 3.5 needle, and Hobbs 80/20 batting.

The pantograph is Dave Hudson's "Rodeo Way". This pantograph is more difficult than most of my pantographs, but because it is less dense it is in the lowest-priced category. The boots, saddles and bucking horses are tricky to quilt because of the tiny circles and angles required. But, just when those elements are navigated through, there are lots of wide open rope-loops which temper the time factor greatly.

Tomorrow I greet the return of my first quilting student. After an absence of several months, she is bringing her finished quilt top and backing fabric to the studio where she'll bravely learn to quilt it herself.

On the hugest machine she's ever laid hands on.

"Maggie's Roses" is one of those pantographs that makes you work. But the all-over freshness of the design is well worth the effort. As I said before, it's not a difficult pattern. But it is a dense pattern. Each 68"pass took about 25 minutes. But each pass was 14" wide. So it was as if I'd done 2 rows with a regular pantograph. The only difficult part of this pantograph is when you stop in the middle of it, answer the phone, and then return to it without being super-careful about which direction you should be heading. Ask me how I know this...

The back shows a slight bit of needle-pokes with each stitch. But the color of the thread against the bright white fabric - as well as the fact that the tension behaved nicely - makes up for it.

Here is the finished front:

And the finished back:

This is the cowboy quilt that will be loaded up next:

This customer is a meticulous piecer. She always gives me clean, pressed quilts with absolutely no issues at all! Such a treasure. She's asked me to use the pantograph called "Rodeo Way" by Dave Hudson.

What I especially love about this quilt is the pieced backing. She found the greatest mix of southwestern fabrics and pieced them together. It's going to be really nice to look at when it's finished.

I haven't decided on the thread yet, whether shiny or cotton or variegated. 

This afternoon I have 2 students arriving for their 3rd quilting class. They're loving how their quilt blocks are turing out, and that kind of enthusiasm is what keeps me going!