Jingle Bell Dance Quilting Pattern

I’m LOVING this new pattern that the IQ is sewing out today. It’s called ‘Jingle Bell Dance’ by Judy Lyon, and I found it at Legacy Quilting. Doesn’t it look wonderful on Roxy’s beautiful Christmas Block of the Month?? I set it up at 6-1/2″ high, flipped “Y” on the alternate rows, and offset it 50%. (That’s the technical stuff for all the robotic quilters out there – if you have no idea what I just said, don’t worry about it, it’s not something you need to know! LOL) I’m using Signature Mustard thread and Quilter’s Dream Poly batting. I hope Roxy likes it as well as I do, if not, maybe she’ll wrap it up for me for Christmas!!!

Please forgive the lousy color on this, I took it with my phone. The colors are MUCH prettier in person – rich reds, greens and golds.

Now I’d better get back to filling mail orders. It’s been VERY busy on the website today! People are LOVIN’ the Caddy Pads and Cut Up kits. And don’t forget all Christmas fabrics are 30% off!

Memorex in the Round

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???

Is It Live, or Is It Memorex?

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!

Learning the IQ

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!!