Quilt As You Go, Simply Done

Simply Done

Quilting By Machine

Caroline Pope’s Table & Quilt

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Another custom sewing table is created (read more here) and a quilt waiting to be finished. Here’s Caroline’s story:

Hi Marguerita,
I am a new machine quilter, this is my first machine quilt. I ambitiously went ahead and pieced together a full sized quilt, not even thinking about how to manage the quilt on my home machine once I got to the quilting part. Thank goodness for your YouTube videos. I know you made them years ago, but I was so happy to stumble upon them. My husband and I made the table yesterday, and already the smooth surface and extra work space is a dream on my practice squares. I can’t thank you enough for putting up those videos.

Sincerely,
Caroline Pope

Caroline's Custom Sewing Table

Caroline’s Custom Sewing Table

Caroline's First Quilt!

Caroline’s First Quilt!

Anissa’s Custom Quilting Table

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Anissa found my Cheap Custom Sewing Table video on YouTube and watched it for a week before contacting me and asking about making her own. Then she sent me a pic with this note:

Just saying hello again. I wanted to show you my quilting table I made, thanks to you 🙂

I will be quilting my first quilt on it tomorrow. Once again thanks!

Anissa

Anissa-2

Isn’t it gorgeous! I love that new color foam that’s out, by Owens Corning. I’ve seen it in Lowe’s but I haven’t needed any foam so I didn’t buy any, but oh, I love the color. This photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s somewhere in the middle of lavender and dusty rose.

Thank you Anissa!

Nina’s Custom Sewing Table

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Nina sent me her adaptation of my “Cheap Custom Sewing Table” along with this note:

Ninas-Table

I recently saw your fantastic video on making your own sewing table. I was all set to do as you suggest, the sturdy insulation, etc., when I hit upon another idea.

My son had a set of Enclycopedia Brittannica many moons ago and they were just on a shelf collecting dust. I worked out that stacking them in twos was just the right height for my Bernina.

Who knew??!

I then found some old travel books that work perfectly in front of the machine….. very easy to pull out when changing a bobbin.

So I followed the rest of your tutorial and bought clear vinyl, I believe it is 7mm thick, very sturdy, and
I have my sewing table! I am so thrilled with it.

Thank you so much for your tutorial. It is much better figuring out a workable table rather than wishing for a Koala table that is way$$$$ up there.

If you haven’t seen it, I made myself a custom sewing table for about $100. I did this about six years ago, and I even made a series of videos about it. You can watch them by clicking here.

The benefits of having a table like this is the large, flat surface that holds your quilt, yet lets it glide like melted butter. No more struggling as it falls off the edge of your sewing machine bed or small table surface. Every quilter I know who has tried this has raved about it and about how much easier it is to handle their quilt for free motion quilting.

The fun thing is, I take it to quilt shows and it stops people in their tracks:

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Quilt As You Go {reimagined}

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4 New Quilts – Endless Possibilities

I found a way to hide the joining strips – sashing, in our first book – and I played with the concept until I had 4 quilts made.

Of course, my idea is that there are LOTS of quilts we can make using this new innovation, but I wanted to get it to you now! So, we wrote and published a smaller book {only 78 pages} with just 4 quilts in it, but I’m pretty sure that when you see the quilts, you’ll imagine how you would make yours, using some of our techniques and your own adaptations.

Each of the 4 quilts has options for changing it and I hope you’ll give them a try.

Meanwhile, we have several more in the works – watch for pics of them here as they are finished.

The new book is available on Amazon, in print (on white paper, not glossy) for $18.95 and for the Kindle Fire for $8.95 (which you can read on any device with their Kindle-for-devices app). I must say, I like the look of the Kindle version (on my PC) best 🙂 You can read more about the book here, and see the quilts that are in it.



Borrow Crazy Shortcut Quilts Book from Amazon.com!

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If you have a Prime Membership to Amazon.com you can borrow our book, Crazy Shortcut Quilts, for free!! Download the sample to your Kindle (or Kindle for PC app, or Kindle for iPad app) and you’ll be offered the chance to borrow the book – then start reading!! Again – you must have a Prime membership to borrow books from Amazon. Here’s your chance to share the book with a friend or view it on your PC or tablet.

I must admit that I bought a Kindle Fire (the new color one) JUST to see how my books look but -WOW- I am enjoying this device!

Do you have an Amazon Fire Tablet?

Sew & Quilt in Comfort

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Just Released!

Introducing my newest book – a work of love! You may have read some of my posts, or seen the photos, of my “Custom Sewing Table”, which I’ve also called my “Cheap Sewing Table”, well, now it’s a book.

The short backstory is that when our book proposal (Crazy Shortcut Quilts) was accepted in 2006, I needed to make eight quilts in about two months. I struggled with comfort, stitching distortions, the weight of the quilts and more and I started innovating. Through much trial and error, I settled on a design that I still use to this day – in fact, I just set up another custom sewing table for temporary use just a few days ago.

For anyone who has seen the videos (there are three so far) or read the Squidoo Lens or even seen my old blog posts – you don’t really need the book unless there’s something about the reasoning, design or adaptations you don’t understand.

Who I wrote this book for is all the people who are not online, who don’t watch video on the computer, who are still in pain or struggling with their quilting and need that extra, printed, hold-it-in-your-hand and look at all the pictures (35 of them) in order to get motivated to create their own custom area.

I found out just how valuable this information is to other quilters by accident, sort of. That’s a whole other story.

My online friend, Margie Wallace, reached through the internet and twisted my arm to make her point about the usefulness of video. I’ll be in her debt forever.

She convinced me to make a video, any video, but make it about something I was passionate about.

Well, I’m passionate about comfort while quilting – I harp on it to anyone who will listen. I made a short video as a learning experiment. It’s a hit. It has been watched over 50,000 times and I get comments on it regularly. Comments like “brilliant!” or “I went from beginner quilter to advanced machine quilter in hours because of your design”. I even got an email that someone took my information and wrote it up in a magazine article!

The rest of the story is long, but the condensed version is that I’ve studied self publishing information for the past two years, recently quit my job, moved, bought publishing software and learned to use it, and I made this book my first self publishing effort. It’s not perfect – nothing I do is perfect – and there are changes I want to make already, but it’s out there, ready to help anyone who needs it.

If you know of anyone who is might benefit from the information in the book, I would be grateful if you would let them know about it. I’ve had too many friends need surgery because of a bad quilt-room, sewing or cutting arrangement when all they needed was some ergonomic intervention. Please help your friends and yourself quilt in comfort today – book or no book – it’s really important to be comfortable and kind to our bodies.

Thank you,

Selecting Fabrics for a Quilt

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I just discovered that I choose fabrics based on the mood I am in, which is often affected by the weather! It’s been raining for about two years here and I long for spring or summer.

These fabrics remind me of summer and warmth

Soft, summery colors is what I went for when I checked my fabric stash for this quilt. I first had pulled out a pile of retro-reprints, but I found that I could not make myself even take a picture of them, never mind envision what type of quilt I wanted. I puzzled over this for a while and then went back to the stash and found these!

Those retro reprints went back into the stash bucket so fast that I’m surprised they didn’t catch fire.

I have 12 Fat Quarters to work with, and I want to use the cutting design (four cuts) that Sarah used on her “Bright Idea” quilt.

It’s Quilting Time! How are you doing on your quilt?

Want to Make a Quilt With Me?

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I’ve been thinking about making another “Shortcake” quilt or else the “Easy To Go Crazy” quilt from our book. A quick and easy design. Anyone want to make a quilt with me? A quilt-a-long where we all quilt together?

I have a free week coming up soon and I’m itching to cut some fabric! Let me know, okay? I could post video updates or something like that, and lots of pics to the blog 🙂

Quilt Binding by Machine

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There are many good methods of putting a binding on a quilt but I’ve never seen how to flip the corners specifically demonstrated and that’s what my friend Rosemary asked to see, so I made a video for her.

When preparing for the binding I start by measuring all four sides of the quilt and then determining the length of binding that I need and exactly how long each side of the quilt should be. If you don’t measure your quilt and binding, it’s easy to stretch either the quilt, or the binding, or both, while sewing them and that can give a wavy finish to your quilt, instead of a nice, straight, flat finish.

I always cut my binding on the length of grain (going WITH the selvage) [this is just my personal preference] and often I cut my binding before I even cut my fabrics for my quilt. I don’t like piecing small bits of fabric to make up the binding, and because I use the length of grain, I find it easier to start my quilt by cutting the binding first 🙂

When I am finished quilting my quilt, I measure out the length of binding for each side of the quilt as I go along, but I only “measure and pin” one side at a time as I sew the binding on. I hope that makes sense! I sew the binding onto one side of the quilt, and its corner, and then I take the quilt out of the sewing machine and measure and pin the binding for the next side.

The video is about how I turn the corners on the binding, AFTER sewing it to the *BACK* of the quilt, because all my bindings are 100% by machine. I never hand quilt anything, but that’s just my preference also. Oh, and the video asks you to subscribe to my channel if you like my videos, which requires you to create a YouTube account. I can’t tell you how much I have learned from watching video tutorials on YouTube on all kinds of subjects. I highly recommend YouTube if you like to learn by “seeing how it’s done”.

Here’s the older video I made for Linda about sewing down the corner on the FRONT of the quilt:

The Story of Penny’s Quilt

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Back in the mid 1990’s I started quilting and it didn’t take long before I fell in love with machine quilting. I machine quilted for Trish Stuart, who had just made the transition from making patterns to making self-published books. We made a great team! I went to Quilt Market a few times with Trish and meanwhile my friend Penny had started quilting – and Penny does everything GUNG HO!
PQsm
Penny and I decided to go to spring Quilt Market to help Trish launch her new book “Color Art” in 2002. The first day was a blast but that night in the hotel room Penny was sick. So sick that we had to take her to the hospital – and there she stayed for 3 weeks. It was incredible trauma for us all and for Penny, who is NEVER sick!

Trish made this quilt for Penny and I promised to quilt it for her but I’ve run into difficulty (as have Trish and Penny) over the past years – and with moving, giving the quilt back to her, moving again, getting it back and re-promising to quilt it, I am thrilled to say that Penny’s Quilt is quilted!

I made two videos to go along with it – the first one tells the story of Penny’s Quilt. It’s an important story to three people – me, Penny and Trish. Probably not too interesting to anyone else, but I wanted to make the video. The lighting isn’t good – I’m still learning how to judge lighting.

The second video is me doing the quilting. I use three different stipple techniques on Penny’s Quilt and I show each of them on the video. I just can’t tell you how wonderful it was to give Penny her quilt yesterday. We sat and talked for hours. She lives about 200 miles from me now and we don’t get to see each other much – but distance doesn’t alter friendship and Penny is a lifelong friend, one of my very best friends. She’s into beading now, as well as quilting, and she’s poking through her bead stash looking for a few sparklies to embellish her quilt with.

Here’s Penny’s Quilt Story:

Here’s how I quilted it: