UFF DA: In Which Rebecca Invades Russia During Winter and Learns Many Ways NOT to Make a Lightbulb: A Longarm Quilting Lament

Uff da, ugh, and blech.  That's my opening statement, summing up my current levels of optimism and enthusiasm.  You may read on at your own peril, having been forewarned that I am currently In a Funk.  But if you DO read to the end, I'll reward you by sharing my Top Secret Weapon with you!

So no, I'm not quilting any feathers, marked OR freehand, because my trial feather quilting went very badly.  Apparently even following along marked feathers with a longarm quilting machine is a talent that eludes me.  I'm in a "what-was-I-thinking-buying-this-machine" funk these past few days.  It's VERY DISCOURAGING to have worked so hard to match up all of my triangle points and piece everything so precisely, only to feel like my quilting looks like ugly scribbles all over everything.  Here is the view from under the longarm frame, looking up at the bottom of this quilt that has been in progress for far too long.  The lights on my quilting frame are shining down through the needle holes

Dogs'-Eye View, From Under the Frame

So I KNOW this is only my second quilt with the longarm machine, and I KNOW that it takes lots of time and practice to learn a new skill blah blah...  Whatever.  Wanna learn from my mistakes?  Here you go:

Lesson One: Changing thread colors to match all of my quilt fabrics is ridiculous.  Like, REALLY ridiculous.  It is taking FOREVER, not like switching thread colors when you're hand quilting and you're knotting off individual 18" strands of thread anyway.  Each new thread color requires changing the bobbin, either to a different color prewound or winding my own new bobbin.  Then I have to check the tension.  And I'm having to constantly advance the quilt back and forth, back and forth, top to bottom, as I go through and quilt all the triangles that get ivory thread, then all the triangles that get gold thread, then all the ones that get pink thread...  A truly obnoxious amount of additional time and effort, not worth it AT ALL on this quilt.  This is why professional longarm quilters typically have an upcharge for multiple thread colors on the same quilt.

Lesson Two:  It is better to choose a lighter thread color to go with a multicolor print than it is to choose a darker thread color.  Dark thread against lighter areas of the print look like ugly, distracting scribbles:

Ugly Scribble Quilting.  Yuck!  Yuck!

See what I mean?  I thought that variegated thread would look great on that fabric, because it was all the same colors as the fabric -- but where the dark navy portions of the thread stitched against the pale chartreuse and mint green, it just looks distracting and awful.  

Lighter Thread Color: MUCH Better!

On this block where I did the boring-but-manageable stippling, I chose an off-white thread color that matched the LIGHTEST color in the print fabric.  The places where the off-white thread crossed coral or hot pink look MUCH better than the places where dark threads crossed light fabrics.  

Whenever I can work in my rulers for straight lines, it's looking pretty good because even if I'm not exactly on the printed stripe 100% of the time, at least my straight lines look pretty straight when they're sewn against a straight edge:

Totally Boring, Quilting Along Stripes

So then I tried to come up with more things I could do with my acrylic rulers and templates.

Clam Shells With Gadget Girls Ruler: Meh.

I need to figure out how to make some kind of reference marks when I use this clam shells template.  Also, see how the tops of my shells are kind of flattened out rather than rounded?  I think that's because the open toe of this presser foot is riding along the curve right there.  Lesson Three: Next time I'm going to try switching to the other ruler foot for my machine that has a circle going all the way around the needle, to see whether that allows me to follow curves more accurately.  For SID (Stitch In the Ditch) quilting, I preferred the greater visibility with this open toe foot.  

Marking Lines With Stencil, Then Quilting With Ruler

Then I dug out one of my hand quilting stencils (above) and a blue washout marking pen and marked diagonal grids.  I used my little 6" ruler to quilt straight lines more or less along the drawn lines, then brushed water onto the markings to make them disappear.  My husband thinks this looks good, but I am reminded of one of those quilted mattress pads from Bed Bath & Beyond.

Quilting Along Marked Lines With My Ruler

I suppose that all this straight line quilting is paying off, because I'm getting a lot better at eyeballing that 1/4" distance between the outer edge of the presser foot, where the edge of my ruler lies, and where my needle is actually stitching.  

Washing the Marks Away After Quilting

I'm trying to mix up the different quilting patterns and repeat designs all over the quilt, and I'm trying not to quilt too densely in any one triangle or diamond. 

Lesson Four: I think I am quilting this quilt backwards.  It feels like I'm driving down the Interstate in reverse.  I'm struggling to come up with different free motion or ruler designs that don't compete with the print fabrics, yet you can't really see the quilting designs on the prints anyway.  I should have done those straight radiating lines on the print fabrics, and used the solid color triangles to showcase all of these different free motion quilting designs.

Lesson Five: If you are a beginner, do not make the exact same quilt that a zillion other quilters are making.  A major buzzkill of making a commercial quilt pattern with the same fabrics used by the designer is that social media is FULL of pictures of other people's quilts that look just like mine, except that their quilts are enhanced by GORGEOUS professional longarm quilting.  I know, I know -- "Comparison is the thief of joy," but I just had to show you the beautiful Tabby Mountain quilt that Kim Stotsenberg posted on Facebook yesterday:

This Is What an Experienced Longarm Quilter Can Do With the Tabby Mountain Quilt

See what I mean?  I am SO NOT WORTHY!  I have seen lots and lots of magnificent longarm quilting on the Internet that is way, way beyond anything I could dream of attempting, but somehow seeing a professional quilter's version of the exact same quilt I'm making, same fabrics and everything, really just sucked the wind out of my sails.

So I went to Kim's web site, Sew-n-Sew Quilting, and learned that Kim has been quilting and teaching quilting for nearly 30 years (I made my first quilt in 2002), she has been longarm quilting professionally for nearly 20 years (I have had my longarm machine for barely a year and this is a hobby for me, just a few hours a week here and there), and she has made so many quilts that she can't count them all.  This is only my second quilt on my longarm machine, for Pete's sake, so I have no business comparing my quilting to hers!

Yet there's that still, small voice of doubt in my mind, doing wicked math problems and telling me that I would be better off hiring someone like Kim to quilt all of my quilt tops for me, considering I only finish maybe one quilt per year anyway and if we divide the cost of the longarm machine by the number of quilts I'm quilting it ends up being much MORE expensive to ruin my quilts with my inexperienced quilt scribbling than it would be to hire a really good quilter like Kim to quilt them beautifully for me...

"Marshal Ney at Retreat in Russia" by Adolphe Yvon, 1856

Now do you understand why I'm likening my longarm machine purchase to Napoleon's ill-fated 1812 decision to invade Russia during winter?  Napoleon dreamed of glorious victory, like I dreamed of the glorious quilting I was going to do, but his Grande Armée was annihilated by freezing temperatures, starvation, and disease as the Russians retreated farther and farther inland, slashing and burning villages as they deserted them so the French invaders could find neither sustenance nor spoil there.  Am I the Napoleon of Quilting???

Well, be that as it may, my troops and I are already in Russia so we're just going to have to make the best of things.  Maybe I'm just in a grand funk and need to get over myself already and just hunker down.  Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that he learned hundreds of ways NOT to make a lightbulb before he finally figured out how to make a lightbulb that actually worked?  So, back to my lessons learned:

Quilting Inspired By Kim's Tabby Mountain Quilt

Lesson Six: Use the Internet as a tool for learning and inspiration, not as a device to destroy all self esteem!  I noticed that, on her Tabby Mountain quilt, Kim quilted straight lines in this one particular fabric that accentuated the diamonds in the print.  It's simple, but effective.  I shamelessly copied this idea, because at this point I realized that marking lines takes up a lot of time, yet I am not so bad at quilting straight lines with my ruler.  Most of what Kim's doing on her quilt is beyond my capabilities, but this one little idea I can do.  And I had to show you her beautiful quilt and give her credit for that idea, and tell you all that Kim Stotsenberg teaches and quilts for hire up in Washington state, and if you can reach her through her web site here if you want to team up with her for your next quilting project.  

Lesson Seven: This is my top secret weapon in the sewing room, you guys, and I'm sharing it with all of you out there who loved me enough to keep reading through my drivel and self-pity:

See Where I Careened Off the Red Fabric, Onto the Dark Blue?

Being a new longarm quilting machine driver reminds me of being a new teenaged driver, beyind the wheel of a very big station wagon that may or may not have knocked over a neighbor's garbage can or two on my way out of the neighborhood.  Sometimes I have trouble staying in my quilting lane, if you get my drift.  See how obvious that is in the photo above, where I strayed off the red and pink polka dot fabric and onto the navy blue fabric?

Oh, Yeah?  WHAT Garbage Can?!!!

Now you see it, and now you DON'T!  I bought a set of these Sakura Pigma Micron 05 permanent ink pens several years ago, and they are absolute life savers.

My Secret Weapon: Sakura Pigma Micron 05 Mistake Erasers

What's special about these particular pens is that they are PERMANENT, they have very fine points so I can carefully color individual thread stitches to make them "go away," they come in all of the colors I need, and they are made of ACID-FREE, ARCHIVAL INK so they are not going to eat away at my thread or fabric over time like Sharpie markers might do.  That makes these pens ideal for handwritten quilt labels and signature blocks, as well as for disguising errant machine quilting stitches as I've done here.  On just this one Tabby Road quilt, I have used the Red, Black, Pink, Blue, and Green Pigma markers to camouflage mistakes that would have been pretty glaring if left alone.  (I just couldn't bear to show you the REALLY bad oopses that I fixed!)  Now, if this was a show quilt, obviously it would be better to pick out the offending stitches.  But I'm a beginner, I am making LOTS of mistakes, and I can't just rip out EVERTHING!  

I also use these Pigma pens in machine embroidery, for those times when I get little dots of white bobbin thread showing on top of the embroidery, or if the outline stitching is slightly misaligned or something like that.  Yet, for all the times these Pigma pens have saved my projects, I am still using that first pack of markers that I bought at least seven years ago.  And I know I've had them that long because I remember using them to fix oopses on my first free-motion quilt that I did on my domestic Bernina machine, the Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt I made for my son Anders' second grade teacher.  (Anders is finishing up his freshman year of high school now).  So I've been using these markers for seven years, and none of them has dried up yet.  I would say they are pretty long lasting (unlike the purple and blue disappearing markers that seem to die within minutes of opening them)!

So...  Do YOU have any Top Secret Weapons in your sewing room that you'd like to share with me?  Any tips or tricks I should know to shorten my Longarm Learning Curve?  If so, please share in the comments!  It's midnight now, and I'm singing a duet in church tomorrow so I need to go to bed RIGHT NOW.  But I'm planning to spend most of my Mother's Day in my studio, finishing up this quilt.  My husband reminded me that this quilt, like all of my quilts, is going to look SO much better, and my wobbles and oopses will be SO much harder to spot, once the quilt is bound and washed and crinkles up a bit.  Momma needs a win...

Happy Mothers' Day to all of you mothers and grandmothers out there!