As this is my 7th quilt off the longarm I am pretty sure I can still be considered a newbee longarmer. I would look at the pictures of free handed longarmed quilts here on the board and wonder, how did they do that? So here are some of my confessions as newbee free hand longarmer and I hope it helps other newbs along their quilting journey.
Some days we are "quilt whisperers" and some days we are not. Sometimes we are lucky and the quilt speaks to us right away in how to quilt it and other days you just have to coax it out of the quilt. This quilt was a coaxer for me. When my friend Meg sent me this quilt I loved it. I loved the colors and I loved her piecing and setting of the strips. I wanted to do something really special for this quilt. So I drew out the block and the sketches commenced. I did a lot of sketches for this and finally picked a winner. Because part of the design depended on a mirror image of one of the motifs I figured I better make a template of my main reference lines so I could chaulk them on to the quilt and get some semblance of balance once the design idea was set in thread and put to the beautiful canvas that was this quilt top.
I had the perfect thread picked out.... or so I thought. I had a beautiful varigated thread from Superior threads. I like poly threads because they shimmer and shine so I had bought several spools of Superior Rainbows at the MQX. OMG! This thread gave me so many fits. It kept breaking. I changed my needle twice making sure I was using the correct needle size recommended by Superior and rethreaded the machine twice. Still it kept breaking. Finally I decided to really loosen the tension on both top and bobbin. Turns out this thread likes almost no tension. I found that out later after going to Superiors website and reading it. Anyway, with all the starts and stops of breaking thread it was really hard to get a good rhythm going. I perservered and kept at it because I was loving how the thread looked when it wasn't breaking! In the end I am glad I did.
So without further ado here are some pictures of this newb's little journey...
The sketches
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The winning sketch
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The quilt
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The template and marking tool
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A marked block
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The back of the quilt
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Close up of quilting on front (warts and all!)
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Another shot of the back
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