Cool Tools

I'm so excited!  All sorts of things went right this past week and it's so nice when that happens.  On top of that, we had a few snow days that cancelled several meetings I had so there was that much more time to work on quilts and quilting projects.

First, I have several quilts for customers and one customer wanted a single cable design in the borders.  I know that there are ways to make cables using tracing paper for hand quilting but haven't yet found a good way to make cables for machine quilting...until now.  Although not a perfect system it works very well for single cables and I've even drafted some double cables with it.  Triple cables (and I'm talking about the number of stitching lines) are somewhat more tricky.  Anyway, the tool is a template called the Sweet Set Curve designed by Pat Barry, another longarmer.  The template is designed to provide a nicely and evenly spaced undulating design around which other motifs can be quilted.  But I used it for these single cables.  Nifty!

You can see the cables in the yellow borders.  The corners are the tricky part but I was able to use the template to swoop into the corners on one pass and to round the inside corner on the return pass.

I think I had mentioned using acrylic sheets before, an idea gleaned from another longarm quilter.  She was using it to audition quilting designs on quilts and I've used it for that as well.  But there's another way to use it...

Another use for the acrylic sheet - to temporarily modify designs on a pantograph.  One of my customers liked the overall panto but didn't like the fish tale in the center of the feathered circle.  Easy to modify and then move the sheet along as I quilted.  Slick as a whistle.

 The week's biggest triumph, however, was getting my embroidery software loaded on my new laptop so that I could take the laptop down to the basement rather than having to lug  my sewing machine upstairs when I needed to embroider something.  It only required downloading a few Windows patches (to a new computer - pretty scary) and a few updates to the Bernina software that drives the embroidery. 

Here it is - laptop and embroidery module all working together nicely in the basement!  For me, this was thrilling!!

Cheers!

Margaret