I was not going to do a custom quilt using IQ until after the holidays……no time to figure it out……I knew in the beginning it would take longer………I should just keep pumping out those overalls…….uh, huh…..I have no willpower

This top was a perfect candidate for Memorexing (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go here.)

It’s a very cool lone star/mariner’s compass done on QuiltSmart foundations. My customer wanted to make it round and had marked the outer edge for me. Now it was up to me to decide how to quilt it.

You may be able to see some light lines on the green background areas. When I’m auditioning designs, I often use white school chalk. It allows me to play, but brushes off easily if I want to try something else. I decided to create some triangle shapes with straight lines, and fill those areas in with feathers. 

IQ can stitch straight lines easily for you, you just move your machine to the beginning and ending points of the line, ‘clicking’ at each endpoint, then press ‘go’ and voila, a beautiful straight line. Then, I wanted my feather motifs to be symmetrical. So, I turned on the record feature, and stitched half of my design. Then I was able to copy it, flip it, take out a few ‘blips’, and connect it to the first half. Now when I needed to repeat that motif eleventy-gazillion times, I showed IQ the boundary of the triangle, and it stitched the design over and over for me – with all of my handguided imperfections that were in the first motif! Here is the first one I handguided:

I also created a second motif for the triangles that were going the other way around the circle:

The whole thing:

And some shots of the center, which was handguided. I figured IQ deserved a rest after all the work it did for me in the borders!

I did do an overall after this. I had another lone star and we decided on baptist fans.

Baptist fans isn’t the easiest overall to do – in order to get it to overlap correctly, I really needed to monitor it the whole time it was stitching. But overall I was very pleased with how it came out. And the customer seemed to really like it too, which is really what matters, isn’t it???

I hope my friend Michelle doesn’t mind me borrowing her phrase for something fun you can do with the IQ. The IQ will let you record your motions when you manually stitch out a design. Then you can set the IQ to repeat that design whenever and wherever you like! So it’s computerized stitching, but it’s using your own handguided design instead of one someone else digitized. Hence the title of this post.

I wanted to try a ribbon meander. First I drew a single meander on a practice piece of muslin.

After I recorded it, I played with it in the IQ software. I copied the design and offset it from the original meandered line. Here is the result:

And this is how it looks on a quilt:

I didn’t get a very good picture of the quilt, as the customer just happened to stop in as I was taking the quilt off the frame! Of course she wanted to take it with her, so I had to hurry to get a pic.

This next quilt was done the old-fashioned way – no IQ, just lots of ruler work and some freehanding in the borders. This was such a neat piecing design, I felt I really needed to keep the 3D and linear effect going. So LOTS of straight lines, but I think it was worth it.

I didn’t like working in the basement in my house, but I did like that I was able to get pretty good photographs of the quilts there. I’m struggling to find a good spot in my new above ground studio, so I apologize for the mediocre photos.

I’ll have another ‘Memorex’ quilt to share at a later date, but first I’ll have to find where I saved the pictures!

The IntelliQuilter is a tablet computer mounted on top of the machine, with motors that drive the machine head around the table. Here it is at work on my first customer quilt:

It’s quite easy to use, I started a customer quilt the day after I got it! But there is still much to learn about the system, and I need to train this old brain of mine the right steps to take. So right now I’m only doing overall designs with it, until I can do those without thinking about it so much. Here are a few of the ones I did this week:

Those two are done with a pattern called Oh My Feathers from Intelligent Quilting that came with the IQ. It’s a beautiful pattern and stitches out well. I also did one with A Rose is a Rose, but I guess I didn’t get a picture of that one. But I had a sample on muslin, and two customers that dropped off quilts this week chose that pattern.

I played with one of the geometric patterns, and think this would be a fun overall design on the right quilt. But I also think just the one row would make an awesome border! I can’t wait until I let myself learn how to do borders!! 

I did give myself one challenge this week. I had a T-shirt quilt to do, and one of the shirts had a pocket on it. I thought it would be fun to leave the pocket unquilted. I wasn’t sure how to do that, so I asked on the IQ List. I had several answers on different ways to accomplish the task. The one I chose was to watch the IQ when it approached the pocket, stop it at the edge, and use the ‘Restart’ feature to start stitching again at the other side of the pocket. Since I had just one pocket to avoid, it worked great.

And the way the pattern came out, it looks like there is a hanky sticking out of the pocket LOL! (Am I showing my age? who uses hankies anymore anyway???). Here is the rest of the quilt:

You can see the pattern the best on the back:

I call it Wonky Square Spirals, I played with the Square Spiral panto in the system and purposely made it off kilter.

I am SOOOOO lovin’ my IQ!!

It’s been a busy few weeks since I last posted. We had our local quilt show the first weekend in Oct. I was in charge of the Silent Auction and the Quilts of Valor booth, we are trying to get a group started here in our area so we were talking up the program and handing out block kits that people can take home to sew and return.

On Sunday morning of the quilt show, my IntelliQuilter was delivered! This is a robotic quilting system that will ‘drive’ the longarm for me after I set up the design. I’ve wanted one of these for a very long time, so much so that I bought the second longarm to put it on! After several hours in the morning while Tony installed the machine and Helen trained me on it, it was back to the quilt show in the afternoon.

I only had 2 days to play with the IQ, then it was off to Des Moines, IA to attend the first AQS show held there. They put on the big show in Paducah, KY every year, but I’ve never been to that one since it is so far. Des Moines was only a 7 hour drive, so how could I not go? I went with Jeri, who is in my little art quilting group, and the last night there we compared the photos that we took. Funny, we both took pics of many of the same quilts, and they were all the artsy ones!

We decided to play a joke on Jeri’s DH – she was kidding him one time about buying a longarm quilting machine. We walked past a booth at the show and there was a SOLD sign on a HandiQuilter. So I got her picture with the machine and we emailed it to Johnny that evening with a note that he needed to send more money!

A nice bonus was the Des Moines Area Quilter’s Guild was having their show at the same time in the same venue for the same admission price. So we got to see 2 shows in one! There were some wonderful quilts in that show as well, and I was very impressed with how they hung their show. In each of the little ‘cubicles’ that are formed by the pipe and drape, the quilts were related in some way – they might all be oriental-themed, or all blue-and-white quilts, or all 30’s prints, etc. It really made for an exceptionally nice showing.

And this week it was back to reality, I actually worked all 5 days, all day! It’s about time, huh??? LOL

Remember what the studio looked like last time I showed it? I rearranged already

Then did a little destruction at the old studio:

Oh, no, what happened to my Prodigy???

And added a few things to the new studio:

I’m even working on my second customer quilt on the new machine! Oh, and it’s now easier for people to find me:

I took that as I was driving away today, I’ll have to try for a better shot without all the glare. But if you look really hard, you can kinda see me in the photo .

I belong to 5 quilt guilds. One in my town, one 45 miles away, and 3 state guilds – South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota. I don’t usually attend the ND or MN meetings, but try to get to their annual shows. This past weekend was the ND show, 5 of us went up on Sat., stayed overnight to attend the banquet, and came home on Sun. We didn’t take classes this year, but each year they have about 3 national teachers. This year they were Brenda Henning, Ellen Anne Eddy, and Wendy Butler Berns who was the banquet speaker.

I’ve recently started to enter quilts in some of these shows – after all if only those who thought they would win a ribbon entered, it would be a pretty small show. So I entered 4 quilts in the show, just for fun, not expecting to win anything.

I was thrilled to find a second place ribbon on my ‘Nine and Vines’ quilt!:

But imagine how I felt when I saw this on my Christmas Ribbons quilt!!!:

I got 1st Place in the category, Best Longarm Quilting, and Best of Show Large quilt!!!!! Oh my gosh! I still can’t believe it! Here’s me with the whole quilt:

And a few more pics:

I was even more surprised at winning after seeing all the other quilts in the show. There were some that were just incredible – intricate applique, trapunto with teeny tiny microstippling, original designs, bursts of color. I wish I were closer and could be more of a participating member of the guild, as there seems to be a lot of talent there, and I’m sure they’re very nice people as well!

Speaking of nice people, I met someone I knew only from the Machine Quilter’s Resource site – Karen L. We had visited in the chat room a few times, and she helped me out one time by sending me some black batting I needed. It’s always fun to meet people you only know from online – especially when they’re quilters.

Now it’s back to reality – have to finish moving the rest of the studio this weekend. Sure hope we can figure out how to take apart the other quilting machine and put it back together without any leftover parts!

Sorry I’m so late announcing the winner of my contest, but I’ve barely had time to come up for air lately. The rules were the winner would be the one to guess closest without going over. The closest guess was actually only off by $4, but it was OVER by that amount. So Alycia is the winner, as the total I spent for everything you saw was only $121!!!!

I haven’t uncovered any wonderful treasures in the mess of stuff that has to be moved, but I’m going to the Indian Summer Quilt Show & Conference in Fargo, ND, this weekend, so I will find something fun there for the prize.

Thanks to all that participated – Kay, you would have won but you missed the deadline!

This is how things looked last week:

And then:

Now we just have to move the other one in, along with all the stuff that goes with it!

I was starting to stress over all the money it takes to set up a new studio. There are so many little things I need to buy that add up. I wanted to turn the back room into a work room where I could have Quilts of Valor work days, or maybe do a few group ’sew-ins’. But I couldn’t justify spending a lot on cabinets and counters when those activities wouldn’t be bringing in any income.

I saw an ad in the paper for a photography studio that was going out of business and selling furniture, among other things. I almost forgot about it, but remembered late Friday afternoon. DH and I went, and look what I found!:

Just the cabinet, the coffeepot came from home

This has a top but we had to take it apart to move it.

These are probably 6' tall with lots of shelves inside.

This is 3 sided, about 5' tall, is on wheels, and is made of slatwall so I can use it for display or hang rulers and other tools from it.

We didn’t have the pickup with us, so told them we’d be back on Sat. to pick up my finds. While DH was working to haul everything out on Sat., I did some more shopping. I found the wicker plant stand you can just about see in the previous photo, and 3 really large drawing pads – like maybe 24″ x 32″. They’ll be great for when I’m trying to sketch quilting ideas in a large area. Won’t the plant stand be cute when I paint it in one of my bright colors and add a trailing green plant?

I was just about to leave, when I thought to ask if they had a credit card machine or cash register. 

And the best part is, all of this cost me only……………….

Wait! Why should I tell? It would be more fun if you guessed! I think I’ll have a blog contest! Whoever comes the closest without going over (sounds like the Showcase Showdown on Let’s Make a Deal, doesn’t it?) will win a prize. I don’t know what the prize will be, yet. Depends on what I don’t want to have to move LOL. Maybe one of my UFOs. (Unfinished Objects, for those of you who are not quilters.) Okay, it won’t be one of those, I promise. It will be something nice.

Post a comment here with your guess by 8am (CST) Mon., Sept. 15 and we’ll see who guesses the closest!

So about 10 minutes ago I’m still mourning the loss of iPhoto, as I try to modify some photos to post in my blog. I started thinking about how I was glad that when I upgraded my accounting package in May, I had them mail me disks instead of getting it as a download.

Then I started to wonder where those disks were??  So I rummaged around on a shelf, and I found them. And guess what was sitting on top of them?

This is the program that includes iPhoto. Guess the only thing that was gone after all is my mind!!!

UPDATE: Thank you all for not telling me what an idiot I am!! This program is NOT the one that includes iPhoto, that would be iWeb, which I still can’t find. Sheesh!!!!!!!