Long Arm Quilting

Fiber Junkies met this week at the home of Kate Weston and welcomed new member Gen Grundy. Our meeting was to learn some of the basics and explore the possibilities of this wonderful machine.  Kate has the full size machine. I've played with them a little bit at quilt shows but we had lots of time to experiment at Kate's house. Gen is trying her hand at quilting on a baby quilt I'm making for my grand-daughter.

 Kate, who is so knowledgeable and a great teacher showed us how to line up and straighten the quilt.  She does this constantly throughout the process so the quilt is nice and straight when it comes off the machine.

 Here is Val working on my piece - right now it's straight line quilting in the ditch.  I'll go back and do free motion work inside each block.

 I thought this was really interesting.  Kate uses huge and very strong magnets that she can put on fabric to hold it to the machine (black strip in back).  This can eliminate the process of pinning the edge of the fabric to the fabric strip on the machine.  I'm not sure when this is used, but in this case, we wanted to set up a piece of fabric temporarily to practice on before quilting on the real thing.

 And here's Val working on her beautiful piece, it's wonderful to see in person.

 Here is the quilt we were playing on - not done yet.  I have to say using the long arm was so much fun. I love free motion quilting and doing it this way where you move the machine head instead of the fabric was really appealing and easier for me. Maybe it's because I have a tremor in my right hand and have better leverage holding onto the handles of the machine.

It was wonderful fun, thanks Kate for a great day!