Miniature Menagerie

Moving on from Easy Street ----I'm frantically working on finishing the machine embroideries "Miniature Menagerie" from Urban Threads,  the Natures Curiosity quilt for quilt retreat. I have six more insects to stitch out on a lovely new fabric I found at our local fabric shop. The fabric is a soft tone on tone beige by Victoria Hutto for Quilting Treasures.

 Cut and ready to stitch. Stonehendge "Meadows"

Easy Street Progress

All the blocks for the Easy Street mystery quilt are finished. Whew! I have a such an appreciation for all the quilters that have finished piecing and quilting this project.  I couldn't put up all the blocks on my design wall, so they are trailing onto the floor.

I'm packing Easy Street and taking it to the quilt retreat this coming week. Hopefully I will get the rows  sewn together there. Lots, and lots of matching seams. "Easy Street"is not "easy"!  I can't wait to get this off my design wall.  My enthusiasm for this quilt has not improved. I still find the fabrics, colors and contrast a jumbled mess for lack of a better description.  

Easy Street

My design wall is filled with Easy Street blocks, and I'm still one, possibly two rows short of sewing the blocks together.  I could do the filler half squares and fill in that bottom portion and call it done except for sewing the block together, (that is sooooo---tempting) but I still have so many cut segments and pieces left to assemble into blocks I might as well finish the last few rows.

I have struggled  to finish this quilt because as some of you know that listen to me whine  about it (thank you for listening)  I keep waiting to like/love this quilt. Maybe when it's quilted?

Brother DreamWeaver --a Closer Look

I get questions about how I like the Brother DreamWeaver sewing machine. 

The Brother DreamWeaver VQ3000

If you spend hours with a sewing machine every day, you do build a relationship with your machine.  You know all the sounds it makes, what they mean, the good and sometimes the bad.  I have owned this  machine since January of this year and totally enjoy it!  No "bads" to report here!

 The DreamWeaver in my opinion is similar to my old beloved Brother PQ1500---upgraded into everything that was wonderful about  the PQ,  only with a lot more bells & whistles.  When you look at the above picture notice the large colored touch icons on the control screen.  Everything to operate the machine except the additional decorative stitches is visible on this very user friendly opening screen with snippet icons of what other stitches are available on pages 2 and 3 in the smaller icon boxes just to the right of the basic utility stitch screen.

Even a clock is visible in the lower right corner which lets me know it's time to do some of those other mundane jobs around here-----sometimes I think I could do without the clock feature! I can also set the machine to "sleep mode" if I get sidetracked from sewing. I have it  for 20 mins. If I'm not back and using the machine in that time period---it goes to "sleep". I touch the screen and it's back in action where I left off.

There is a large eleven inch wide arm from the needle to the far right of the machine which is also well lit. Note the multiple light reflections on the extension table. No additional lamps are needed around the machine.

The light setting goes up to 5, but  I have it turned down to 3, which seems perfect.

The needle-sewing area with the laser turned on to center position.

In this picture I have the somewhat unusual named "MuVit" foot attached. The red marked foot attachment was offered as an additional purchase last May.  I'm not sure why Brother didn't think to make the original foot attachment with the handy red reference markings.

 This foot rolls. Unlike most regular walking feet attachments or  IDT systems.  It has taken me  a bit of time to get used to this foot, but now I love it.   It sews very precise -even stitches on the thinnest, and thickest fabrics and has 10 adjustable pressure settings. 

Mr. MuVit

 My MuVit Video

 My primary interest in owning this machine started out with wanting a better feed dog system. A narrower feed dog system.  It's what I didn't like about the previous machine I used and over the years I have overlooked the importance of feed dog configurations in favor of brand names and their popularity  with quilters when purchasing a machine. No more.

Here is a 9 mm feed dog system. Note the width and position of the feed dogs between the needle. Look at that wide open space of blank metal just before the hole in the needle plate and the smaller feed dogs are situated way at the back of the needle plate. This type of feed dog system requires the quilter to position the fabrics back and under the foot to make good contact with all the feed dogs and presser foot,  or use what is often referred to as a leader and ender,  which is a small pieces of fabric that you sew onto and off of  prior to sewing onto your actual piece of fabric, or learn special techniques to get good sewing results.

A 5 point  9 mm feed dog system

Below picture is of  the Brother DreamWeaver 7 point 7 mm feed dog system. Even without the single hole needle plate inserted, this feed dog system holds and feeds the fabric evenly and without any special technique required.  So, unless you need a 9 mm feed dog system because you use the wider decorative stitches available on some sewing machines, please consider the narrower more precise 7 mm  feed dog system instead when considering a newer sewing machine.

The DreamWeaver laser light is not a gimmick as one might think and I'm sure the more I use it the more uses I  find for it.  Now,  I primarily use it for referencing a 1/4 inch seaming, and for sewing diagonally. Just for those sewing functions it's been an amazing time saver, and now I wonder how I've sewn with out it! 

Diagonal seaming with the laser turned on center 3.5 position.

Center position with the laser beam.

Quarter inch position with the laser beam.

The Brother DreamWeaver is heavy, and weighs in at approx. 42 lbs.  So it's not a tote around sewing machine although mine did come with a nice wheeled tote I think the only place it will be going is for an annual cleaning.

This machine is about as close to everything "perfect" you may want in a sewing machine. It comes with an excellent users manual and all the basic sewing feet you will need for the most part. The only additional  foot I've purchased is the red line marked MuVit foot attachment.  

This is the Multi Function foot pedal. You can set the pedals to perform various functions in the menu section of the machine.  I have set the larger pedal for sewing forward and if I press my heel down, it reverse sews. The smaller pedal is set to cut the thread. This is really nice if you don't want to move your hands away from holding the fabric to the top function buttons on the machine. The machine also comes with a knee lift and a manual presser foot lifter plus a function button at the top of the machine that raises and lowers the presser foot. So, there are three ways to lift the presser foot. Some of the newer machines no longer have the presser foot lever at the back of the machine. 

Multi Function Foot Pedal

I have taught myself to sew with my left foot, and use the knee lift with my right leg. I credit a very good machine quilting teacher who early on encouraged me to learn this method. Multi task your feet and knee! Not make your right leg and foot do all the work! (grin)

There are many useful well thought out features on the DreamWeaver which make it nearly perfect in todays sewing machine market.  I'm not here to promote this machine, but I've been asked questions about how I like it, and thought this was a good venue for answering some of your inquires. 

PS. I love it!

String Quilt---Finished

I've quilted six donation quilts in the past ten days.  I think that's a record!   I attribute this  to the fact that I have a stock pile of (guilt) ---and quilt tops from our Remnants mini group to get finished that have been hanging in my sewing room closet for months, and also that I love my new Leader Grips which making loading the quilt backings onto the long arm so easy-----

I don't spend a lot of time deciding on quilting motifs when it comes to donation quilts. My motto as I've mentioned before is to get them done & delivered.

This twin size string quilt was a joint project with my friend Carolynn. We went to quilt retreat together in April and the last day of retreat she had finished her take along projects. I had bought along the strings of fabric and she offered to make the string blocks.  She did great!

If you want to learn more about making String Quilts please visit Mary Johnson's web pages. This is where I learned about String quilts----how to make them, and also some places to donate them.

Later on I pieced the quilt and added the border and hung it in the closet.

Yesterday I quilted it with the Circle Lord Swirls design and finished the machined binding this a.m.

I love using Judy Laquidara's method for machine applied binding for donation quilts rather than hand stitching the binding to the back of the quilt. This twin size quilt took me about an hour to bind!  The tutorial for Judy's method is also listed here on the side bar of my blog. "Tutorials."

 Our String Quilt (Carolynn & Angie)

  A closer view of the Swirls design

The backing is a piece of fabric from my stash. Not pieced.

This is another Remnants donation quilt top I finished on the long arm  this past weekend.  Swirled! and done! Bless Michael at Circle Lord for inventing and designing this template system!

"Pinwheels in the Garden"

Swirled

Leader Grips---No More Zippers!

I liked my zippered leaders for a long time---don't get me wrong. They work well, and I think if you do a lot of quilts where you take one quilt off to "zip" on another quilt to do custom quilting so that you can do edge to edge quilting on another quilt project, and you have multiple quilting projects going on-- zipper leaders work really well.

What was getting to me was having to take the quilt backing to my sewing machine, find a place to lay out the backing fabric close to the machine, move projects I was working on out of the way to sew on the quilt backing to the zipper leaders, find the centers of the leaders, match the centers of the quilt backing, insert some straight pins to hold the backing to the leader, get the leader fabric and quilt backing fabric under the sewing machine foot, make sure I had some cheap basting thread loaded into the sewing machine (I never used my "good" thread for machine basting)---sew baste the leaders to the fabric. Take the quilt backing attached to the leaders back to the long arm. Zipping was fast. No problem there. Once the quilt was finished, unzip, and clip a few basting threads, pull the bobbin thread, and everything was a go.

I just got tired of this routine.  I had at one time tried the Renae Haddins' Red Snapper system, but for the life of me, I could not (and neither could my strong armed husband) ---get those Red Snapper grippers to clamp over the Red Snapper rods inside the leader fabric casings.  We tried for weeks in hopes they would loosen up a bit. But, it never happened. Renae was very good about a refund. Maybe the problem we experieced was our fault or the product has changed. I hear good things about this gripper system as well.

Now, years later all zippered out--- I was looking for some type of gripper system that could possibly work for me.

I heard about "Leader Grips", watched some You Tube videos on the product and thought about it for a few weeks.  I actually found myself avoiding machine quilting because it meant I had to sew on the zippered leaders. I know that sound lazy, but that's how I felt----

I decided to order the Leader Grips. If all else failed, I would return them. They arrived in less than a week. All was not well the first two times I attempted to clamp them onto the leaders. I thought, oh-no, here we go again.

I started to analyze why the quilters, like Matt Sparrow aka: ManQuilter using the Leader Grips  in the video was not having the problems I was experiencing. I concluded it had to do with the channel or hem in my leaders plus the long measuring tapes I had also sewn onto the leaders that was in very close proximity to the hem or channel. The leader grips were bumping into it.

So, I removed the measuring tapes. I never used them anyway. I used the center marks I had Sharpie penned into the fabric instead.

I inserted the Leader Grip rods which by the way are just slightly smaller than the Red Snapper rods---and I noticed the channel even though it was the 3/4 inch hem the Leader Grip documentation suggested was still too much excess fabric. The rods were not tight in the hem so the grippers would slip around over the excess fabric. I made a new stitching line or hem line in the leaders with my long arm. Now the Leader Grip rods are tight inside the leader fabric and no more slipping.

Following the Leader Grip video instructions once more---Success! The Leader Grips went on smoothly! I press them on with the heel of my hand. I am very pleased with the Leader Grips and have completed 3 quilt tops in 3 days! No more procrastination or contemplating or mental block about loading a quilt backing onto the long arm.

Yay! I can load my quilt backing in about 15 mins. now. I'm sure I'll get even speedier with time.

Here are some photos of the Leader Grips on the quilt backing I loaded today. Number Four quilt!

Leader Grips on the front leader. One small gripper holds the center of the quilt in place while I put the the two longer grippers in place over the fabric.

The extra length of Leader Gripper plastic sleeve extending beyond the quilt backing that is loaded and rolled onto the long arm roller.

The Leader Grips holding the fabric in place on the take up roller.

The small Leader Grip indicates the center of quilt backing and holds the fabric in place on the leader  while I insert the longer Leader Grip clamps in place. I leave the smaller gripper in place.

Leader Grips holding the quilt backing. Partially rolled. Ready to load the batting and quilt top.

I purchased the 8 ft. two leader system because I float my quilt tops and don't use the 3rd leader

Three Martha Quilts~ quilted in Three Days!

 Donation quilt #1

 Donation quilt #2

Donation quilt #3

Leader Grips to the rescue!

Wordless Wednesday

Fun Pillowcases

Yesterday I made pillowcases for my sister in laws little grandchildren.
I had so much fun stitching these up.

Corvettes, Rockets and Ladybugs!

Tip: Pencil Grips

Tip: For all my machine embroidery friends. Buy some pencil grips and make your hoops more comfortable to grip and tighten.

Latex free silicone type pencil grips. Cut in half then slip them on.

Want to keep your hoops clean from sticky residue. Another Tip: "Williams Electric Shave" on a Viva paper towel or cotton ball works like Magic! ---added bonus; it has a nice fragrance and won't harm your hoops! Rinse and dry after cleaning.

Pineapple Angel Food Cake

I found this recipe on another bloggers posting. I thought I would give that blogger credit, but when I goggled "Pineapple Angel Food Cake"---the search came up with dozens of sources for this quick easy cake recipe.

Want a quick desert! You just need a few basic ingredients.

Pineapple Angel Food Cake

1  package of Angel Food Cake (any brand)

1   20 oz. (tall large can) of Crushed Pineapple (don't drain this)

One of your large mixing bowl because this mixture bubbles and foams up. Stir by hand, no mixer required.

Put the cake mix in bowl, open the can of crushed pineapple. Don't drain it! Mix it thoroughly into the Angel Food cake mix. Pour into a 13 x 9 pan.

Toppings:  You don't need "toppings", but it certainly adds to the enjoyment of serving, and I think it the cake would taste a bit dry without a "topping".

Suggestions: Cool-Whip, Whipped Cream, Ice Cream, some pineapple--a cherry on top!

Bake at 350 degrees for approx. 35 to 40 mins. Don't open the oven door when checking cooking, it makes the cake deflate some. Let cool before serving.

Here are some pictures.

Mixing it up! I'm right at the brim of my bowl!

In the pan!

On the plate! Enjoy!