If you haven’t already guessed, I chose FOCUS as my word this year.  It’s been a journey to get to this point; doing LESS in 2010, HONING my skills in 2011, and now trying to FOCUS on the things that will help me to be most successful.

I’m not sure I ever shared this with anyone except a few close friends, but I think it’s time to declare my intentions to the universe.

You see, Ebony Love is going to be a household name.  Ummm… not THAT way.    A household name in the kind of households that quilt.  It seems such a waste of a fabulous name to fritter away in obscurity, wouldn’t you agree?

So that’s part of the thinking that I was doing at the CMQG Retreat last November; part of what was bugging me was working on stuff that didn’t seem to have a purpose, and not really making noticeable progress on anything even though I seemed to get a lot done.  A friend of mine (well, several friends of mine, in their own way) kept telling me that I needed to focus somehow, to figure out what it was that I wanted, and to do the stuff I needed to do to make it happen.

What I want is to be a resource for quilters, to be a recognized expert in the areas in which I apply myself, to get my designs and ideas out there where they can inspire and influence the quilting world.  In my head, that’s all possible, if only I apply myself.

This year, every time I pick up a project, or start working on something, or get an idea, I will need to consider whether it puts me closer to my goal or pulls me further away.  That’s not to say I will make the right decision every time, but by putting it in those terms, it brings FOCUS to the front of mind.

As far as my goals for this year, I want those to be focused as well; when I look at the goals I set for 2011, they were a mixed bag both in terms of what they were and which ones I actually achieved.  This year, I want to call out the things that are most important; not that I don’t have other things going on, but these are the things that MUST get done this year.

Goals for 2012:

• Publish a book about fabric die cutting.  If there’s anything to say about this industry, it’s that you’re not taken completely seriously unless “author” is one of your accomplishments; but aside from that, I really honestly believe that I was meant to write this book.  It’s tentatively scheduled for a late April/early May release.
• Attend Spring & Fall Quilt Market.  I have plans to meet with fabric companies, publishers, and distributors.  Spring Market is in Kansas City this year, so if anybody is going and wants to share  room, let me know.
• Release a line of designer dies.  I have so many ideas for quilt designs that would be much easier if there were dies to accompany them! If you don’t have a die cutter yet… maybe you’ll consider getting one when you see what I have in mind.    “How” to get this done is the million dollar question, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
• Raise my profile through writing and teaching.  With a book coming out, I’ve got to make some appearances!  I’ve already got a lecture & workshop designed (contact me if you know of a guild who’d be interested in learning more about die cutting.)  I’m also writing a regular column for an awesome magazine, and continuing to make videos and TV appearances, in addition to publishing my magazine.
• Publish 4 patterns.  Last year’s goal was pretty aggressive, but by making a few changes in how I write them and by combining them with my teaching and dies, this should be totally achievable.
• Let other people do the things that anyone can do, so I can do the things that only I can do.  This is sort of a general principle for the year, but it’s starting to help me let a few things go.  It enables me to reach out for help where I need it, and be more OK with not doing everything myself.

There’s nothing on here explicitly about making or finishing quilts, which is kind of funny for a quilter, right? Rest assured there are quilts to be done – I can’t very well publish a pattern or release a die without a quilt to go with it!

I’m hoping that by declaring my intentions, it will help to cause the things I want to happen, and hold me accountable for achieving them.  It’s certainly a lot, but I am super-excited about the things I’ve already been able to do in the first 6 weeks of this year.  My only problem now is feeling pressure to do all of this NOW, all at once.  I’ll try to pace myself but it’s hard to contain my excitement!

Needless to say, not a lot of sewing has been going on over here, but I have been pretty busy getting things in order. Let me try to catch you up.First, my destashing continues at the studio, and I will probably have my open house on March 23 from about 9AM – 1PM so everyone mark your calendars.  This day happens to coincide with the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild retreat, so ladies on the way, take note… my house is sort of on the way to the retreat, though you have to get off the highway and head west.  But, if you haven’t been to my studio before, consider it an awesome field trip you’re not likely to make again!

Second, I’ve had to pull back considerably from a relationship I have with a major manufacturer.  It wasn’t contentious or ugly, we parted on very good terms, but I realized that in a lot of ways, that very close relationship was keeping me from doing things that I wanted to do and within my own time-frame.  I think people were also starting to get the impression that I was an official spokesperson for them.  I do happen to love their product, but that’s easy to do when you use it every day.  I hope that we’ll be able to work together again, but in the meantime, by severing a couple of ties, I’ll be more independent and be able to do lots and lots of cool things that I couldn’t before.  Lots of mystery, but lots of cool things in store for you and for me!

Third, most of my writing attention has been focused on getting my book completed.  I am very much behind on it, but I’ve made a ton of progress this week.  I’m sending a draft to my book designer this weekend – he’s doing the cover and the fab layout – and I’m hoping to get it published in April or May.  After much consideration, I decided to go the independent publishing route for this one.

When you write a book, particularly a quilting techniques book, you have to be willing to write it and let it go.  The publisher gets to do what they want, publish in their own sweet time, and not pay you very much money for all your hard work.  In return, you are freed from having to make seriously minute decisions like, where to put the page numbers, whether the headers are .375″ or .4″ from the margins, or from having to hire photographers and editors and book printers and distributors, and doing the marketing, and financing, and the list goes on and on.  Because this book is highly personal to me, and I am highly invested in it, I just cannot bring myself to turn my book vision over to someone else to execute. It just does not seem like a fair trade off.

Unfortunately, because of the furious writing I am doing, I don’t get to do very much sewing.  That means a lot of other projects get neglected.  However, I have been able to advance a couple of things on the business front.

One of them was to find a reliable, repeatable source for batik fabrics. I’ve established a relationship with Benartex, so I will soon be offering quilt kits and select yardage over on Quilt Possible.

I also got a lecture & workshop gig for the Northern Lake County Quilter’s Guild.  I’ll be lecturing about using die cutting in quilting, and then doing a workshop on Drunkard’s Path.

Even though this is the workshop quilt, I will be writing up the pattern and making up a couple of fun kits, so you’ll be able to find those also over on Quilt Possible.

Finally, I wanted to give a shout out to my friend Jennifer M.  She is helping me to finish that very last commissioned quilt that I’ve had for a year and a half.  I made some boo-boos and just wasn’t motivated to correct the errors.  Jen came over yesterday and tidied them up, and we came up with a plan to finish it that I am very pleased with.  On top of that, Jen is more of a perfectionist in her piecing than I am, which is very great for me because then I can leave my projects in her capable hands and not feel guilty about not doing the sewing myself.

To me, anyone who can come in and work on a Double Wedding Ring Quilt, correct your mistakes, and insert curved pieces that you’ve partially stitched has mad skills in the sewing department.  That’s all I’m saying.  She fixed these pups in a couple of hours, and now we are well on the way to getting this quilt finished.

This morning I have a super-important appointment on one of my super-cool mysteries… so wish me luck!

Last Sunday, I went down to the city (because despite claiming I live “near Chicago”, it’s still over an hour’s drive to get there) to film three new episodes with Mary.  I don’t know when they will air; they filmed the entire season over a three day period, but presuming that they filmed in the order the episodes will air, they are closer to the beginning of the season than they are to the end.

It’s difficult to catalog one’s time during a taping, primarily because the shoot is so expertly scheduled that there is very little “down” time to just putz around taking photos of everything.  As soon as I got there, I went into makeup, and the filming started within 10 minutes of my arrival.  Quilty is filmed in a downtown quilt shop (Quiltology) which I had never been in before.  It’s very small as quilt shops go, but packed into that space was lots of color, quilts, a display of Aurifil thread, and a sock monkey!  I can now see why people refer to my studio as a quilt shop, because honestly, it looks a LOT like Quiltology.  Except I don’t have the wall space to permanently display quilts.  It has given me the idea though to potentially install a ceiling track so I can hang up quilts and push or pull them around the room.  That would be fun.  Anybody know a handy man?

The episodes I filmed had nothing to do with die cutting, long arm quilting, or anything else you might consider me an “expert” at, but I can tell you that I actually do not care what we do on Quilty, because Mary is tons of fun to hang out with, and we always giggle A LOT when we are together. We are like two little quilted peas in a pod.

I don’t know if I ever told y’all the story of how I even met Mary or got asked to be on her show in the first place, but I can guarantee you it was not through my own efforts.  The more I dip my toes into this business, the more I recognize that WHO you know is 90% of it.  I wish I could say that talent had a lot to do with it, but there are a lot of talented people out there swimming about in obscurity.  The lucky thing though about being in the quilting industry though as opposed to music or movies is that almost everyone you meet is kind, open, and friendly.  If you can’t make friends in this industry, odds are, there’s something wrong with you. 

Anyway, how I came to be on the show last summer has everything to do with Robbi Eklow.  She & I have been on the same email list for years, and although I knew she lived in the Chicago area, I had no idea how close we actually lived to each other, and I still wouldn’t know if she hadn’t been kind enough to reach out to me.  From my perspective, Robbi was entirely too famous and too busy to deal with the likes of me, so I thought the only way to justify contacting her was to ask her to do a workshop with my quilt guild. Unfortunately, my Program Committee position ended before I’d even worked up the nerve to compose an email to her.  (As much as you all might think I am outgoing & extroverted, I really struggle with meeting new people & striking up conversations.  It’s pretty rare for me to reach out to someone and make the first attempt, so I am very grateful when other people do, otherwise I wouldn’t have any friends at all.)

Robbi sent me an email last spring, because she noticed that our mailing addresses are at the same location.  That was an indication that we probably live pretty close to each other, and therefore should get together for lunch.  That first lunch lasted about 4 hours, and I think we ended up having dinner too.   We had so much to chat about and I have to say we became pretty fast friends.  I love when that happens!  She’s been to my studio & I’ve been to hers, we both have long arms, but our quilting styles are very different.  I am totally into pieced quilts, and her work is about 98% applique.  She dyes her own fabric, I am “commercial” until the day I die.  Maybe one day we’ll work on a quilt together, but for now, we’re pretty content just being friends who love quilting & going out to lunch.

What does this have to do with Quilty?  Well, she had been asked to appear on three episodes with Mary last summer to talk about long arm quilting.  I didn’t know it at the time, but she actually proposed to them that they have me on as a guest instead because I actually quilt for other people, and she only works on her own quilts.  I got on the show because Robbi was willing to share her spotlight with me, and the show agreed to the arrangement based on the strength of her recommendation.  I am pretty confident that if I had written and told them they should do a show on long arm quilting with me as the expert, it would not have happened. So whenever anybody asks me how I first got to be on Quilty, I say it’s because of Robbi.

Now the recurring guest bit?  That has everything to do with the fact that Mary & I love to hang out together & we have a clear rapport on camera.  The thing about Mary is that even if you’re not “friends” with her off camera, when you’re at a shoot, she’s so easy going & personable that it feels like you are friends.  The best part though is that I think now I can truly count Mary among my friends, and whether I ever appear on another show or not, that will stay the same.  That girl is a HOOT, and we just have lots of fun, so it just tickles me to no end when I am invited to do a show, because it gives us an excuse to hang out.

So there’s my Quilty story, Robbi story, and Mary story all rolled into one.  As far as what the show was actually about, I can tell you that it was about hand applique.  You all know that whenever I do applique, it’s all fused, and I just quilt the heck out of it to make it stay put, so it was nice to work on a technique that isn’t my area of expertise but is still cool.  I did bring a couple of quilts with me to the shoot, and Jack (the Director) snapped a couple of photos.

]]> http://www.lovebugstudios.com/2012/01/15/quilty-taping-with-mary-fons/feed/ 6 http://www.lovebugstudios.com/2012/01/15/quilty-taping-with-mary-fons/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LovebugStudios/~3/PO03Cd7jp4w/ http://www.lovebugstudios.com/2012/01/14/let-the-destashing-begin/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:14:06 +0000 Ebony http://www.lovebugstudios.com/?p=1343 I started grouping fabrics the other evening, and then got inspired to start snapping photos.  Once the photos got taken, it was a short leap to start listing them in my Etsy shop!

I settled on a price of about $5.00 per yard for things that come off of bolts, and slightly less for collections that I put together from fabrics that are less than 1 yard.  If you are local and you want to buy something & save the shipping, just send me an email through my contact form, and I’ll invoice you separately for the purchase.  I’m still trying to figure out when is a good day to have an open studio sale, but with the snow we’ve had now, I don’t think mentally I can handle the idea of a bunch of people tromping slush through the house.  However… if you want to make an appointment to come by, we can arrange a private showing – just give me a call or send an email.  Just keep in mind that locals must pay sales tax.

I know $5.00 per yard isn’t necessarily a steal, but I do have quite a bit of yardage that I paid full retail for, and as I said, I don’t want to lose my shirt.  The idea is to try to leave me “whole” or to a slight advantage, so that from a tax perspective, I’m still OK. I don’t have everything listed of course, but these were the easiest to put together & photograph.

When I start my life as a fabric retailer, you will know.  Right now, I’m just a business liquidating assets. 

Well, if you’ve been following along, you know I’m on a journey to discover what kind of quilter & artist I want to be.  As I make new discoveries, I become very motivated to shed the things that no longer fit my interests, aesthetic, or desires.

I looooooove fabric.  You might say that I am obsessed with fabric.  I fondle it, cuddle it, stroke it, and the very sight of it makes me giddy.  I loooooooove my stash, but while doing the inventory this week, I discovered that I love the IDEA of a stash more than I love my ACTUAL stash.

There are some true gems in my stash, and others that I feel ok with letting go.  However, I am at the point in my business where I cannot afford to donate or give away hundreds of yards more of fabric… but that doesn’t mean I have to sell it at full retail.

The idea here is to purge the stash of things that no longer fit me, and fill it with things that do.

When I look at the quilts I’ve been making, they use solid fabrics, batiks & other ethnic prints, geometrics, and everything is BRIGHT.  Very few of those fabrics come out of my stash, except for the solids, because I rarely have enough of the thing I want, or the right color.  Fabric fabric everywhere, but not a piece to use in my quilts!!

I want my stash to be a place with consistency and repeatability, so that when I make a quilt for a pattern, I am also able to offer that pattern as a kit.  I can tell people exactly which fabrics were used and where to get them.  I don’t want any possibility of some fabric designer coming after me with a lawsuit because I used their fabric (yes – this happens.)

I also want simplicity… I have to inventory everything that comes in, and when I run out of a fabric, unless it is a Kona solid, there is no way to get that fabric again.  It is gone.  That bloats the inventory numbers and just makes it a bear to manage. Incidentally, this fits in with the word I’ve chosen for the year – FOCUS – which I haven’t talked about yet, but you can see where this is going.

So… anything that doesn’t fit my aesthetic has to go.  In this picture of my stash, that is nearly the entire bottom row! 6 bookcase shelves worth.  That’s a LOT.

My question to you as a reader & fabric purchaser… how would you prefer purchasing fabrics from my stash?  I do not want to list & photograph every single piece – that would be insane.  I am thinking of grouping things into colorways – blues, greens, yellows, reds, etc. and offering half and full yard cuts of groupings.  So I would take a photo of a stack of “blue” and say, you will get “x” number of yard cuts from this stack.  Of course I would also offer some open studio hours where locals could come in and browse and purchase. If you were in a position to buy, what would you prefer?

First, I’ve been quilting my little tail off to try to get all these quilts finished, and… I did!!! I ended up needing to quilt several quilts a day for a few days in a row, but in all, I managed to quilt 50 quilts this year in my first year of long arm quilting, and 18 of those were finished in the last 30 days of the year.  You’re probably wondering when I’m going to post about them, but that’s going to need to wait.

Second, I have a couple of caveats to mention. One, I do have one quilt on the frame for a local artist who I promised to quilt for before I stopped accepting projects. Second, although I no longer accept orders for custom quilts, I do still have two projects that need to be finished. Neither customer is in a hurry, which is good because I won’t be able to spend much time on them in January.

Third, year-end is just a sucky time for small businesses who carry inventory and don’t reconcile their accounts regularly.  Oh, I keep meticulous records about what fabric is used on which projects, how much thread, what was purchased and from whom, etc.  It’s just that… I keep it all on paper in envelopes and in email folders instead of entering it into my accounting software.  I think I’m still a little bit gun-shy about the computer system, since the last one I had got corrupted & I lost the entire year of entries.  That was a complete & utter mess to unravel, but then so is entering an entire year from paper envelopes into the electronic system.  I am promising myself to do a weekly reconciliation this year.  That will make it a lot more manageable.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be a complete & total bore in this post, but I do find it hard to focus on being creative when I have taxes and a physical inventory to do. 

So between that, and my filming some Quilty episodes this weekend, I’m gonna be quieter still!

See you on the other side!

Today, I got a letter in the mail from my mom.  At first, I thought she sent me the wrong letter, because it said, “Dear Mom,” at the top.  But then, I noticed the date, and it was dated August XX, 19XX. The point of the letter?

It was a letter my mother composed to my grandmother, on the day of my 4th birthday. It was quite a chatty letter, but it starts off talking about the real china tea set that my grandmother sent to me, and how I wouldn’t put it down or play with it outside, because “Grandma doesn’t want me to play with my dishes outside because there might be an accident on the concrete.”

Since my mother wrote the letter, I won’t contradict her memory, but I must say I am impressed at the wisdom, insight, and articulation that I displayed at the age of four.   It also gives a little glimpse into the fastidious adult that I would become (notwithstanding the careless teenager & 20-something in between.)

It also detailed my early propensity for bodily injury when I “broke” my arm skating, because my friends were holding my hands and wouldn’t let go when I started to fall.  It’s amazing I still had my front teeth since I couldn’t break my own fall, but in an amazing twist of irony, I lost the adult ones only 4 years later when some idiot boy pushed me down an icy driveway because he wanted to watch me try to “skate.”  If you’ve ever had the occasion to see my blinding-white smile & amazingly straight & flawless teeth, all I can say is… thousands and thousands of dollars, and years and years of reconstruction.

The letter also gave little glimpses of my mother at 26…

Working, and taking her lunch hour to go buy my birthday cake and ice cream & bring it to my school.

Selling her house (that had doubled in value in the four years she owned it), so she could afford to quit her job and start college.

Contemplating her own divorce, to be final on September 3rd, while her baby sister gets married 17 days later.

Musing about how the beauty of Boulder, Colorado would be very conducive to studying.  (Meanwhile, I notice that she has misspelled “conducive”, and it makes me wonder if, at least some of the time while I was growing up, her “look it up in the dictionary” answer to my spelling questions were not merely lessons in self-sufficiency, but a smart way to avoid exposure as a bad speller to her child.)

Detailing out her plan for supporting us during the lean years of school; teaching twice a week, getting money from the VA (but losing even more money in benefits because of the divorce), getting money from the government’s Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, and a work-study job counseling women veterans.

Being so happy she could scream because her boss said that even though she was quitting, she would be welcome back anytime, but not before she got the degree.

Being gifted with an IBM Correcting Typewriter from that same boss as a going-away-to-school present.  A typewriter!!!

Being “scared stiff of unemployment, but it’s a risk [she has] to take to improve [her] situation.”

Me sitting here in 2011… knowing that my mom did not finish her degree at that time.  I don’t really know what happened, but I know she spent the next 14 years being a strong advocate for me and instilling the importance of education (even when I didn’t want to hear it) and making sure that I got exposed to the right opportunities to be able to attend an Ivy League university.  She eventually did get her Bachelor’s degree, but it wasn’t until well after I’d left the house & got settled in my own right.

I don’t always get along with my mother (does anyone?) but I can appreciate and love the fierceness of her spirit and determination to make it, despite being a 26 year old divorcee with a terribly curious and accident-prone four year old on her hands. (And fastidious. Don’t forget fastidious.)

Anyway, I just wanted to share that, because it was so unexpected, and delightful, and heartbreaking all at the same time.  I wonder what other letters she’s got?  Maybe the one I wrote to her at 13 years old, making an impassioned plea to allow me to convert to LDS membership…

So… I’ll bet you can’t top THAT as a Christmas present. 

Happy Holidays to All!

- Ebony

So far, I am happy with the threads and love the colors, but the thread is so new that there isn’t a lot of information about them.  I hacked my own threading & tension settings, combining techniques from other 40 wt & polyester quilting threads.  On my Fusion, I’m getting a bobbin tension setting of about 120 -140 on the TOWA gauge, and for threading, I skip the center hole, loosen the tension slightly, and use a #18 needle.

All that is great, but the ONE problem I have is that these aren’t full sized cones, so I’m definitely going to run out of my favorite threads. Why is that such a problem?  Well, because the colors were experimental, they didn’t have color names or numbers assigned, and there was no guarantee that they would produce all the colors or make them the same way.

Still, once the production of these threads were released, and named with Aussie flair, I thought it would be simple to just ask Superior to tell me which experimental colors were produced & which threads they match up to.  The problem with THAT?  Superior says they didn’t keep any of their experimental cones, so they have no idea which goes with what.

So, I decided to do my own color matching, and publish the chart here.  I’m pretty sure this has a limited audience, because I doubt the people who ordered those experimental cones actually read my blog, but I figured if I was going to go to the trouble of producing a chart, the least I could do was put it someplace where people can find it!

There were 17 experimental colors, but they actually produced 30 different colors for the entire line.  I’m only pairing up the 17 with what looks closest, and my disclaimer is that I’m going by my physical thread cones & the color chart on the web since the entire line is out of stock & I can’t order any cones.  Superior doesn’t know that I’ve done this (yet) and so I would say use at your own risk.

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This should be a lesson to me, to always measure measure measure, before I pin pin pin.  It wastes soooo much time to prepare a quilt to be loaded, only to find out the backing is too small for the quilt to be quilted.  You’d think I’d learn my lesson by now, but… nope.

This first backing is too small, because I accidentally used the wrong backing fabric from the owner’s first quilt:

It’s not slightly too small… it is very clearly not big enough and not intended for this project.  My only option was to contact the owner, apologize profusely for my mistake, and ask her how she wanted me to handle it.  There were basically two options as I saw it:

• Replace the backing with a flannel that I happened to have on hand from another quilting job that got canceled.  It’s the right size, but not the same color as the original backing.
• Order a new backing fabric, at my expense.

The owner chose the backing I had on hand, which actually worked out great for me, because I don’t like stocking flannel, and I had 4 yards that didn’t have a home in my studio.

The only reason I even offered this as an option is that I thought it would go well with the quilt – so the key here isn’t just to replace a backing with “whatever” if you mess up, but to find an alternative that gives the customer as close to what they had originally, and to try to make it right.  Of course I will not charge her for the new backing, and I will return the other backing fabric to her as well.

The second backing is too small because I loaded the quilt the wrong way.  Oops!  Before your jaw drops on the floor and you wonder how on earth this could have happened, it’s because I decided to re-orient the quilt and quilt it on the long edge, but then I decided to float the quilt top, and I forgot that I had rotated the backing fabric.  Because the extra amount of fabric on the sides seemed to be correct, I just went ahead and quilted it this way.  Imagine my surprise when I got to the end of the quilt (yup, I didn’t discover this until I was on the last row of quilting) to see this:

Argh!!  That’s the second quilt this week, and again is my fault.  How did I handle this one?

Well, I know the owner has a very “I don’t care” attitude about this quilt – she already told me that she didn’t really like it that much and would just use it as a couch throw.  So in this case, I knew she wouldn’t care how I fixed it, and I didn’t consult her at all (though I did apologize for the mistake.)   Since I knew the quilt back had extra fabric on the sides, I took the quilt off the frame, cut fabric off of each side (because I still needed the quilt to be roughly centered so I could reload it):

And then stitched an extra flap onto the bottom of the quilt back.

After that, I just repinned it to my leaders, and kept going.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, unless you know the owner very well & what their likes/dislikes are, I don’t suggest you hack into their backing without asking first.  It may turn out to not be a big deal in the end anyway, but it’s important to own up to your mistakes and apologize, offer up a solution, and let them choose.  Obviously, you can avoid this mess in the first place by measuring measuring measuring, but even the best of us have an off day, or week in my case. 

This third quilt wasn’t the result of my own mistake, but I could have avoided a lot of heartburn and work if I’d measured first.

First of all, I didn’t measure it because the backing had clearly not been squared or pressed.  It looked like it had just come out of the dryer, got folded haphazardly, and stuck in a bag.  If you’ve washed fabric before, you know what it looks like fresh out of the dryer!  So to be honest, I wasn’t in the mood to even deal with it.  Part of the reason was because this was a king sized backing, and that takes a couple of hours to press & square.  Although I have the space to press & square a backing that big, I don’t like having to do it when I don’t know I have to do it ahead of time.

Some people don’t have the room to handle quilt backs that big, so they really do need the long armer to do it for them.  That’s fine, but if you need this service, please tell your quilter in advance.  Don’t hide your backing at the bottom of the bag & hope they won’t notice.  When we’re ready to quilt, we’re ready to QUILT, and we don’t want to stop, heat up the iron, clear off the cutting table, haul out the squaring rulers, etc. and take 2 hours to do something we could have done the day before if only we had known.  If you let us know in advance, we can plan to do another quilt while we fix your backing, and do it with a smile on our face instead of a knotty frown. 

I have so many quilts to finish right now that I just did not have the time to fix this one myself, so I am very lucky that my friend WenR volunteered to come help me the other day.  She pressed the backing expertly, and then learned my method for squaring large backs.  It was so fabulous to have this done & neatly hung on the hanger, that I just forgot to measure it.

Well, imagine my surprise to load the quilt and find this:

Yup… that’s less than an inch of width between the quilt top and the backing.  No, the quilt doesn’t fit in the other direction (ha, ha.) No, it wasn’t the squaring that impacted this, because the squaring was of the non-selvage edges.

Now, when I get narrow backs, sometimes I can still quilt them by basting muslin strips on each side.  However, in this case, the “extra” on the sides is actually a selvage, and that’s just the worst thing to stitch on.  Plus, the selvage would end up getting quilted in, and that would make the quilt edges very wavy and not nice looking.  In this case, the quilt goes back to the owner, unquilted, and it will be up to them to decide how they want to fix the backing.

Hopefully, now that I’ve seen how much extra work results when I skip steps, I will measure measure measure before I pin pin pin.

The first thing I noticed about flannel quilts is that their seams are much thicker than normal cotton quilts, especially if the seams are not swirled or flattened.  My machine is not calibrated to handle such thick seams, and to be perfectly honest, I did not want to make the adjustment in order to accommodate them.  The change would have to be made in the height of Darcy’s foot, and after reading the 2-page instructions on how to make the adjustment, I decided it was just not worth it for two flannel quilts.  Sorry folks – that’s one lesson you will not learn from me. 

I also noticed that flannel is “sticky”; that is, once you lay it down on top of the batting (this was Hobbs Heirloom batting), good luck adjusting it!  And because of the thickness of flannel, it’s impractical (especially on larger quilts) to load it onto the quilt top rail, because it gets too thick to roll.  So floating these flannel quilts is almost a necessity.

There’s also something I want you to take note of in this photo: see how wide the backing is in comparison to the quilt?  Well, that’s because this is the WRONG backing for this quilt.  I don’t know how the backings got mixed up considering my meticulous system of inventorying each quilt, but mixed up they were.  My advice to you, if you ever find yourself quilting multiple quilts for someone at the same time, double-check that you have the right backing fabric.  What should have tipped me off was the generous dimensions… no quilter is EVER this generous with their backing. 

For those of you who are sending multiple quilts out, you should name or number your various quilt components, and attach that information to the quilt, ideally in the same place where you have marked the centers of each piece.  I had quite a few people do that on their quilts, and it really came in handy.  And while I’m handing out advice, NEVER pin anything to the back side of your quilt top.  I can’t tell you the last time I looked at the back of someone’s quilt top before loading it, and especially if the quilt is floated, whatever you have stuck on the back is getting quilted in permanently.  Your top border front is the very best place for notes, because that’s where we start quilting.  But please don’t use straight pins anywhere you are marking; those are the worst!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been scratched & poked by someone’s wayward straight pin, and it does not put me in a good mood for quilting.

Anyway! Here’s the story of how I quilted this particular quilt four times.

Round 1 – The Feather

I initially decided to make this quilt my first attempt at feathers on a real quilt!  I have drawn & doodled enough feathers that I almost feel like I could do them blindfolded.  Unfortunately, my first attempt at a feather looks as if I was blindfolded:

I think that if this quilt were more of a consistent light color throughout, the backtracking wouldn’t be as noticeable, but where the stitching hits the dark colors, it just sticks out like a sore thumb.  I’m terrible at back tracking.  I know it’s a matter of practice, but I just like free-form stuff that doesn’t require as much precision.  I have no problem constructing a quilt with 1/4″ seams, but when it comes to quilting, I don’t like having to “color inside the lines.”  Quilting is my out-of-the-box experience. Maybe that’s why I hesitate to put a computer on Darcy; I don’t like the idea of precision-perfect quilting stitches coming out of my studio, it’s just not my thing.

However!  That doesn’t mean that I am OK with quilting that looks like crap, and that’s how I would describe this.  I actually knew this feather sucked before I was even half done with it, but instead of stopping at that point, I thought I’d keep going in the hopes that it would somehow look better.    That turned out to be a false hope.  So, I took the quilt off the frame, ripped out the feather, and started over.

Round 2 – The Freehand Spiral

After ripping out that feather, I decided to try a different block.  In this one, I quilted feathers again, this time in only the light triangles.  That turned out to look pretty good!  Then, I had a dark center to work on, and I decided to freehand some petals and spirals.  Yup, it’s another one I finished knowing it sucked, and then had to rip out again.

It was at this point that I started to suspect that it wasn’t necessarily the quilting that was the problem, but the thread color that I had chosen.  Maybe the thread was just too light to use in the dark areas.

Round 3 – The Stencil

After ripping out the petals & swirls, I tried a stencil instead:

I actually think this looks really good, which made me flip-flop on the thread vs. quilting debate in my head.  My quilting was just crappy, and crappy quilting just shows a lot worse when you have a high contrast between the quilt and the thread.

Round 4 – The Water Pattern

All the stopping & ripping and re-doing of the quilting put me behind schedule, so I actually had to take Carol’s quilt off the frame for a while so I could work on another customer’s quilt.  In the intervening time, I had a chance to reflect on the direction I was going with Carol’s quilt.  Although her quilt wasn’t very big, I did have a complicated quilting plan, and I still had no idea what to do in the other block where I’d removed the large feather.  I’d spent many hours on this quilt and didn’t really like where I was going with it.  So I made the hard decision to take out ALL the quilting, and start over from the beginning.

(This actually was an easier decision to make in light of the fact that I didn’t have to do the ripping.  I had a friend over, and she sat down and did it for me.  Bless her for doing that!  Otherwise Carol’s quilt would probably still be sitting there unfinished.)

I decided instead to switch to a variegated thread, and it gave me the opportunity to use some experimental thread from Superior.  They recently came out with a variegated line of So Fine in a 40wt, and they gave people the opportunity to purchase the experimental cones before they settled on all the colors.  So these cones have funny names like “EE” and “JJ.”  I selected a pretty blue & purple thread labeled “II”.  Now, since this is a brand new thread, there weren’t any tension charts for it, so I had to experiment a bit:

This thread had a very unusual tension setting, much different from anything else I have used up to now.  The TOWA reading on the bobbin was between 120-140 (normally it’s up around 200), the top tension had to be loosened a bit, the needle I used was 4.0MR (110/18), and I had to skip the center hole when I threaded it.  Maybe you’ll come up with a different combo, but that’s what worked for me.  It will be interesting to see what Superior says when they come out with an updated tension chart for this thread.  I believe they call it So Fine #40, and the color names are all Australian. 

After deciding on the new thread, I thought I would try a free-handed water pattern over the quilt.

Here’s a shot from the underside:

Isn’t that a cool look?  Like stained glass.  This was me laying on the floor under Mr. Darcy to take this photo.

I used this pattern because I actually have another customer quilt to do this on, and I thought it would be good to practice first.  It’s a lot like stippling, but is more fun to stitch.

Here’s the finished quilt from the back:

And here it is from the front:

Overall, I am much happier with the quilting and the thread choice.  I learned a lot about how the thread color can make or break the quilting, but that high-contrast between the quilt and the thread isn’t necessarily bad.  I also learned that… I don’t like feathers.  It seems like everyone is very impressed by feathers, and indeed I can appreciate their beauty and how great they can look on a quilt, but I just think they are not for me.  My friend WenR says that I’ll like feathers more when I accept the fact that my feathers are different from what everyone else does, and maybe if I stop thinking about & calling them feathers, I’ll be able to bring myself to put them in a quilt again.  We shall see!