Monroe

Good tips! Here are a few from me.

Use good thread! Old thread can be fragile and bleed.
Clean the bobbin area often.
Don't forget to oil/grease your machine regularly- esp the vintage/antique ones.
Use the right bobbin for each machine- again good quality will save a lot of headaches.
Mist the fabric and use a dry non-teflon iron- esp if you have birds or asthma. Teflon fumes can kill birds.
Be sure to check your scant 1/4 inch seam allowance, and spot check units as you sew. It will save a lot of frogging and frustration!
Do an internet search to check for corrections, updates, and suggestions for patterns Before cutting!

grammasharon

Great idea!

cherrybsixty

GrammaS, I'll be check this post daily myself, as long as it's current, just some good tips here

Happy sewing everyone

bearisgray

30-60-90 and 60-60-60 degree triangles do not work for making triangle in a square units.

I bought these triangles thinking they would work - another learning lesson! It took me a while to figure out WHY they weren't working.

See attached.

Watson

Pick up a small plastic container with a tight fitting lid to put all your old needles, bent pins and dull rotary cutter blades in. Keep it up high, away from little fingers.
Take pictures of your designs up on your design wall and look at them on your computer screen to get a better feel for the finished product.
Use free photo editing software like "Ribbet" to turn your quilt photos into black and white to check your quilts for colour value placement.

Watson

KarenK

So many excellent ideas!

I have learned:

* Precision counts.
- if the fabric is cut correctly
- if the sub-units and blocks are the correct size
- then sewing the blocks together is SO much easier

* Using a gray scale helps me determine the value range of my quilt. My current quilt has a value range of about 2 or 3 through 8 or 9 (reading from left to right). Note: not sure how accurate this gray scale is - made it up.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]574375[/ATTACH]

* To use binoculars backwards. Somewhere / somehow I acquired children's toy binoculars (Carmen Sandiego's ®). Looking through them backwards reduces the visual size of my quilt and helps me determine is anything is too light or too dark. There was a huge dark splotch in the lower right corner and 11 blocks were pulled and replacements made.

rryder

Take photos with your smart phone. Then use the built in program to make them black and white. This helps establish value range at all steps of the process from choosing fabrics to piecing blocks, final layout and choosing borders and binding. Also if you print out an enlarged version of your pieced top you can use it under tracing paper to plan your quilting---that's a trick I learned in a Lisa Calle class- lots of fun to use this technique to see all the different ways you can quilt a particular quilt!

Rob

popover

As an ex-sewing machine rep, I can tell you its pretty hard on the machine too, eventually knocking it out of timing.

daisydawg

ILoveToQuilt and popover, thanks for answering my question. Makes sense and have just changed my really dull needle.

grammasharon

I learned the hard way that if my machine develops a small squeak, take it apart and clean all the lint out. lol I faithfully brush the bobbin area out but failed to take it apart. Lesson well learned.