Fabric for LA leaders
 

I am needing to change the leaders on my HQ and will go shopping next week for fabric. I just wanted to pick your brains and experience on this. The one I have on came with the machine and is now wonky and stretched out. I am thinking some kind of canvas that is strong but not too thick

The leaders on my Gammill are thick canvas, and heavy. You do need something heavy and thick so it won't wrinkle over on itself and so it will stay smooth and straight.
A word of advice from experience: prewash and shrink your fabric so later you can spot clean if needed. Mine weren't prewashed/shrunk and spot cleaning made a wrinkly spot-shrunken mess. I had to remove the leaders and wash/shrink them to re-straighten and re-smooth them. It was a HUGE undertaking. I thought I'd never get done ironing them to get the wrinkles out.

the fabric i got for my leaders is very polyester... absolutely no stretch and quite thin. and a bonus... the design was straight lines

I was told to use pillow ticking. It's not as heavy as canvas, so easier to pin. I agree with Justabitcrazy, prewash/shrink the fabric before making your leaders. I also suggest you get 2 tape measures that have zero in the middle and sew them right to your top and bottom leaders. When you put the leaders on your machine, line up the zeros, 25 inch marks, 50 inch marks. Makes it so much easier to put your quilt back on the machine. Good luck!

I bought the ones from HQ and red snappers. The red snappers have been the best investment as it is so much quicker loading the quilts on my machine than pinning!!! I would high recommend them. I bought them when my LQS offered a 30% off and now that I have them they are worth every penny I spent on them.

I agree with pillow ticking. Just be sure to get the kind that has the lines woven in. I Googled to find a place to purchase online.

Canvas does not guarantee not stretching. I had canvas leaders before the pillow ticking leaders, and mine got wonky on the diagonal at the edges -- probably from having the canvas loose while rolling smaller quilts. I am more careful about rolling now. I do prefer the pillow ticking to the canvas, though.

I didn't prewash the pillow ticking (sigh). Should have.

Next time I will use velcro to attach the leaders to the rails. Have seen some tips on how to do that. Use industrial strength velcro, for one. If you need to mark a straight line on the rails, a nifty way to do that is to line up two rails together, then run a marker along the line where they meet; marks two at a time.

The problem with making your own leaders, is that they're usually over 100" long. When we make leaders for the Grace frames, we buy a poly blend fabric that's about 54" wide, from a wholesale distributor, and cut about 10 sets of leaders from a bolt. You could probably get one set from 3 1/4 yd of 54" wide fabric. You can get two 12" to 18" widths from a regular width fabric. Then your take-up leader needs to be wider -- so it can go around the 5th rail. You'd cut that one about 24" to 28" wide. So you'd have to double that if your fabric was a regular 44/45" wide. Take a big pin with you to test the "needle" of the fabric. You want the pin to slide in easily. There might be something in the home dec. section of the fabric store that would work. It doesn't have to be white.

Then you need Velcro that's as long as your leaders, so it will attach to the frame. You can get a 25 yd roll of Duragrip (just the loop side) from HookandLoop.com for about $15 plus shipping.

Good Luck with your endeavor!

Thank you all! I am taking all of your recommendation to the store with me. I am going to a warehouse and should be able to find what I need. I only need 18" on each side by 110" , so I think that 3 1/4 yards would work.

I think this is the pillow ticking I used for my leaders:
http://www.beverlys.com/striped-pill...lue-cream.html

Hard to remember, but I think I got 7 yards of it to make 3 leaders for my 10' frame. There was plenty left over. The stripes make it easy to cut straight lines and square off the corners. The above ticking is different than screen-printed ticking (such as fabric.com sells). In fact, I think James Thompson and Co. may be the only ones who make real woven pillow ticking these days. Check for colors, too. I got mine in pink and really like it; pink is soothing to me, whereas I would have found the traditional blue somewhat depressing.

Edit: Here is a link to the different colors:
http://www.beverlys.com/woven-stripe...-thompson.html

Canvas or ticking. I found my ticking with the old fashion stripes at JoAnnes