Why I Love Show and Tell

Our sewing group meeting yesterday was great fun. We always do show and tell after lunch. The eye candy yesterday was over the top. I think my favorite was this flying geese quilt that Beth did:

Beth and a couple of the other women have longarm machines on frames. While looking at the quilting on the various pieces, we got into a discussion about rulers on frames versus rulers on my machine, which is a longarm in a table. Beth said she is struggling with rulers because she has to hold the ruler with one hand and move the machine—which has handles—with her other hand. When I quilt with rulers, I am able to have both hands on the ruler while I slide the fabric around. The machine is stationary.

The differences between the various machines fascinate me.

When I got home, I sat down with the red Candy Coated and started quilting that one. I have decided to do meandering swirls. Swirls are basically loops with tiaras. I switched to the stippling foot, which is open on the front and allows me to see what I am doing. I also got out one of the Bernina gripper rings that I bought in Spokane a few weeks ago:

I don’t like wearing gloves when I quilt, although I have to in order to maintain a firm grip on the quilt. I am so used to feeling my work with my fingertips—be it knitting, sewing, or whatever—that to have gloves on that eliminate that sensation is very disconcerting. I bought the gripper rings after seeing Amanda Murphy use them in one of her videos. I was hoping they would allow me to free motion quilt without having gloves on.

I love the gripper rings. What a game changer. This is the 8” ring; there is also an 11” ring. I switch back and forth periodically because I can’t quite decide which one I like better.

My swirls are okay, but I can tell the difference between mine and ones that are done on a frame. The machines on frames are on ball bearings and move smoothly across the fabric. My swirls still look a bit jerky to me. I need to work on smoothing out the motion. I was also quilting late in the day, which is not my best time. This is not an heirloom quilt, though, and I have to practice on something in order to build up the muscle memory. I am not unhappy with this so far.

We did a lot of laughing over lunch yesterday. I left feeling grateful that I live where I do and also for the islands of sanity in the midst of the chaos of the last couple of years. I wonder about the psyche of this country, because I think that in some ways, we’re damaged beyond repair. And we did it to ourselves. How the human race has managed to avoid annihilating itself is a mystery.

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One of the ladies in Ruler Club is also a student in my T-shirt class. She chose—with my blessing—to make a T-shirt to fit her rather than starting with a kid’s T-shirt, so I asked her how her first iteration turned out. (Students are supposed to bring them to next week’s class so we can hem them on the coverstitch.) She said she was very pleased and just needs to make a few tweaks to the pattern.

The class manager at the store and I talked about it and decided to schedule another T-shirt class for April, May, and July. We had some requests for an evening class to accommodate people who work, so this one will be on Tuesday evenings from 5:30 to 8:00 pm. The store owner is also very interested in a T-shirt class for people who don’t have sergers and want to learn how to sew knits on their sewing machines (thank you, Joanna!). That’s going to be a one-session class, though, focusing on the kids’ T-shirt pattern.

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I started making backs for the tops that Pat has put together. I don’t have to do much other than measure the wideback fabric and rip it to the correct width. (Widebacks are ripped, not cut.) When we tie comforters, we usually put them into a frame, but we only have one spare frame and we want to tie 4-5 comforters at our party in a few weeks. The last time, I sewed all of the backings and tops together, first, so that each one was finished except for the tying. That was a lot of work. My brilliant idea for this group of comforters is to make the quilt sandwiches and then baste them on the Q20. We’ll still have to bind them after they are tied, but we can do that by machine.