Wednesday 10 December 2014

More learning

As this blog is about a journey (with side trips) learning to long arm quilt, this celebrates this learning.  I just finished a quilt for a friend and fellow quilter.  The challenge was that the quilt had a lot of black but also jewel like patches.  What colour to quilt and the back was a dark red with a black design.  All black?  All light beige or cream?  Neither option was a good one.  So I took the plunge and did two colours.  The bobbin was consistently black but the top thread was changed from black to a golden beige.  It worked.  Much checking with each roll to see that the tension stayed constant hiding the reverse colours on both sides of the quilt.  It turned out.  As it is not my quilt there is no picture but I am truly pleased and so is the owner.

The additional advantage of doing the two colours was to solve the problem of receiving quilts for which you have no additional practice to set the tension.  Well problem solved.  Put a contrasting thread in the bobbin, really contrasting, and test stitch a bit and get the tension right.  Then a couple of minutes of picking out the stitches and problem solved.

Learning happens in so many ways.  I just found the actual manufacturer of my robot and the robot software.  The YouTube videos for Butler are fantastic as is their service to my questions.  The manuals that came with my machine have pictures but the videos and accompanying explanations spoken are wonderful.

I consider this my present leading up to Christmas.  Research something you cannot understand and you do not know what you will find.  Of course this is only two or three steps in a learning journey.

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