Quilting With Gummy Gloves

Just a reminder, I am moving all of the concrete-related content over to the husband’s website. I’ve set up a blog over there called Form and Pour—The Blog. And on both of our websites, I’ve set up a way for you to subscribe and have new blog posts sent directly to your e-mail inbox. Click on the Contact/Subscribe button in the navigation bar to find those signup forms. Your e-mail address (on either signup) will be stored in my Mailchimp account. I will not sell it or share it.

I’ll be making a few more updates to this website, too, but nothing that should affect the blog.

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When I machine quilt, I wear a pair of gloves that help me to grip the fabric. It sounds almost counterintuitive to wear something that decreases sensation when doing something that relies so heavily on one’s hands, but they really do help. I’ve been buying and using the Fons and Porter gloves because they are inexpensive and easy to find at Joanns, but they don’t last. I’ve had this problem with two pair already:

Sometimes I have to remove safety pins—basting pins—from the quilt as I move it around. If they get caught in the knit of the gloves and I don’t realize it, they tear a hole which just continues to get bigger until the gloves are unusable. I also have to remove the gloves to thread the machine or do anything that requires very fine motor skills.

Angela Walters has been using some new gloves in her videos. She carries them in her online store. I thought they were intriguing because two of the fingers on each hand are cut out—the ring and pinky finger. I am not sure why those two are cut out and not the thumb and index finger. . .

The quilting store south of Kalispell just completed a big expansion project that doubled the floor space. They moved the classroom into the addition, which puts it clear on the other side of the building from the longarm machine. That solves what used to be a big problem: customers couldn’t rent time on the longarm machine if there was a class in session because of the noise. Moving the classroom opened up more space on the retail floor, too. Things were getting pretty cramped in there. I spent some time walking around the “new” store last week, getting familiar with the layout and looking at each section. I spotted a new kind of gloves on one of the display racks:

The husband wears these kind of rubber-coated gloves every day. My kids long ago dubbed them “gummy gloves” and that’s still how I think of them Marianne, the store owner, suggested I cut off the tips of the thumb and index finger on each hand so I could thread my machine.

They are thicker than the gloves I’ve been using, but I don’t notice that much when I am quilting. And I doubt that I am going to rip any holes in these.

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I cleaned the house yesterday morning and then spent a few hours sewing. I’ve switched to piecing on the Janome, not because I need the even-feed foot but because I wanted to use some blue painter’s tape as a seam guide. I am wary of putting anything on Vittorio that might damage the finish.

I don’t want to have to draw diagonal sewing lines on hundreds of small squares, so placing the blue painter’s tape on the bed of the machine gives me a guide for the bottom point of the seam. I might pick up a roll of the new Diagonal Seam Tape from Cluck Cluck Sew if I see it at one of the quilt stores, but the painter’s tape works well. I also looked at mounting a laser guide on top of the machine, but I still wouldn’t be able to use that on Vittorio because it relies on adhesive.

After some monkeying around to figure out how to organize the fabric pieces to feed most efficiently into my chain-piecing system, I was off and running. This new design incorporates two alternating blocks. I made two of each just to see if I liked how they looked. EQ8 is good at approximating how a design might look, but making it up in actual fabric reveals any unexpected interactions. So far, I am very happy with how this is coming together. It’s nothing amazing or spectacular, but not everything has to be a masterpiece to eclipse all others.