Secrets of Free-Motion Quilting on Craftsy!

Hooray! Today is the day! Not only is it Election Day, but today my first ever video class, The Secrets of Free-Motion Quilting is available on Craftsy!

A little about the class:

• We build on simple continuous line designs to create new and interesting variations using skills you already have.
• We cover seven design families, one in each lesson. You'll see lots of free-motion quilting designs and lots of me drawing and stitching them. 
• And my favorite part is that in each lesson we practice looking at a FMQ design and breaking it down. I want you to feel confident in re-creating the designs you see out there in the world, in quilt shows, on blogs, in books. So I made it a point to teach how I break down a design to understand it. 

I tried to include all the little guidelines I've developed for myself as I've improved my free-motion quilting. So there are little "secrets" sprinkled throughout the class. I hope they are helpful for you!

I watched the class and I'm very happy with it. The only thing I wish was different is how I look! Why do I keep making that nervous face that looks like a sneer? Why did they have me wear that much makeup? These questions will never be answered. But the stitching is good, so I can handle the other stuff.

My special offer for all you dedicated blog followers is this special link for $20 off.  This will be good here on my blog for the next two weeks. Update 11/22/14: Half price link is gone but you can often find sales at Craftsy!  I do get a bonus when you use my links when you shop for classes on Craftsy so if you can click from here, thank you!

If you've never taken a class on Craftsy, you should know that once you purchase the class,  it stays in your account forever. You can watch it on your computer at your own pace, as many times as you wish. If you have questions about anything in the class, I can answer them online though their class discussion function. I think I'm going to love that part, getting to interact even though we aren't in a classroom together.

Well that's my big news, thanks for sharing in the excitement with me today.

Happy stitching everyone!

FMQ Weekly: Wayward quilting design

This is an easygoing free-motion design I want to show you today. This one is good for a quick finish. Not that you need those. Not that you're ever finishing your binding the morning that you have to give away your quilt. No, that never happens.

So this is what I call a follow-along design, meaning you give yourself a guiding line and then you follow along that line with the next step.

a. To start you give yourself a wavy guiding line. 

b. Then you come down one side of your guiding line, making a loop in every indentation in the line. 

c. Now go along the other side of the guiding line, doing the same thing. 

d. Move over and start a new wavy line. leaving enough room between them for adding the loopy lines. 

You can see how this gives you a not-completely-plain design but it doesn't ask much more of you than a simple wavy line would.  I like a design that can handle natural variability and so I tried practice stitching this one with more and less stretched out wavy lines, as well as varied sizes of circles. It worked well with all of those variables in play, so I think it qualifies as a beginner-friendly design. 

Here's a no-narration video, because it's so fun for me to show you how I do it!

I have been trying to show you my new designs on patchwork so you can see how they might play on a quilt. This is a very busy quilt block but hopefully you can still see how pillowy and lighthearted this design comes across.

And don't miss it: today is the last day to sign up for the giveaway for my soon-to-be-announced Craftsy class.  The giveaway has ended. If you'd like to check out the class, click the image below:

Happy stitching!

Quilt all the things

I made this journal cover out of a beautiful piece of wool from the Pendleton Woolen Mill store. I went there because my friend and superstar Susan Beal was writing a book about sewing with their fabrics and I was curious. Her book, Hand-Stitched Home is out now and it is lovely. Cozy and sweet, which is exactly the kind of person Susan is.

So at Pendleton I picked up a piece of this thick, solid colored wool that was different colors on each side. It was labeled "Jacquard". I think usually jacquard means complicated weaving but in this case even though it was solid it was done on their jacquard looms, and that is how they got different colors on each side.

I thought I would make a little clutch out of it or something. But then one day I got that FMQ itch and I thought.... what if? And I started stitching on some of the scrap wool I'd gotten from the scrap bins on that same shopping trip....

And then I tried it with thicker thread on that lovely mustard wool...

And wow! How cool to not have to worry about batting or backing, just sit down and stitch.

I took a picture of the sticker on my fabric in case you're in love and want to call the Pendleton Woolen Mill Store and see if they can find you some:

What an easy present! Measure your piece, stitch something pretty, fold over the edges and stitch along the top and bottom. The one thing I was particular about was keeping the stitching from going off the edges of my piece, I didn't want to cut any threads and have them unravel.

This makes me think holiday gifts. (One down, twenty to go!)

Happy stitching!

FMQ weekly: Starbles and Craftsy giveaway!

A few of you mentioned my gloves following my last post. I can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet (well, I did, but only on Instagram...). I cut off the first two fingers and thumbs from my quilting gloves. I love it. Now I can thread my needle, fill my bobbin and even use my phone without taking off my gloves. It's also much cooler in the summer. Very happy I did this.

Ok so I made another no-narration FMQ video! Thanks for the supportive comments and suggestions, this is a fun way to share the free-motion love.

This is a pebbling design variation. I'm going to call it Starbles, as in Stars + Marbles = Starbles.

a. To start you make a circle. A big one, because you have to fit a star inside.

b. Then you extend a line into the circle. Not directly toward the center, but a little off to the side, in the direction you intend to go around the circle creating your star.

c. Then you go around the inside of the circle creating more points, until you return to the point you started.

d. Then travel around the outside of the circle and start your next one.

Here's the video:

You can do this for every pebble like above but I think it looks pretty sparkly to just do it in an occasional pebble. I show both in the video.

If you watch the video you'll see that my machine is occasionally skipping stitches. That's from a dull needle. After the video I replaced it and everything was better.

And finally, the day of announcing my Craftsy class grows near! I worked hard on it and I think it's the perfect class if you've had a little introduction to free-motion quilting and want to go a bit farther with it. Here's a little peek:

So with things getting close I am going to have a giveaway for one lucky quilter to take this class for free! I would love it if one of my blog followers won! Please enter at this link. The giveaway has ended and if you want to take the class now you can!

Ok that was a lot of info for one blog post. But I didn't want to wait to share any of that! Happy stitching everyone.

The FMQ weekly: Wibbly Wobbly free-motion design

Do you see what I just did there, breezily claiming that I'll be posting about FMQ once a week? I love establishing grandiose plans just to see what happens. What probably will happen will be something like this. But let's just try it out anyway.

Today I want to teach you this quilting design and show you a video of it in action. I named it Wibbly Wobbly to thrill the Dr. Who nerds.

Only first I want to tell you a secret. When I was a kid, I used to try to chew equally on both sides of my mouth. Like, 2 marshmallows on the left, 2 marshmallows on the right, 1 on the left, 1 on the right, and so on. That, unfortunately, is not normal. I manage to get through my days now without hard-and-fast attention to my chewing, but I still have this brain that wants to focus on patterns all the time. So that's why I think this stuff up and how lucky am I that I have a blog where I can post it and make it look like I am doing work, instead of just suffering from a strange obsession. I guess what I'm saying is: without you, I look crazy. So thanks for reading.

Ok enough chit chat. What is awesome about this pattern is it has a lot of pebble-POW without having to actually cover the space with pebbling. Quilting with pebbling has a tendency to chew up bobbins and time. This is pebble impact in half the time.

The entire pattern is based on this shape:

If you make that shape back and forth down a whole column it would look like this:

If you squeeze them closer together you get this:

And if you can handle that then you can make this pattern just by changing the size of your circles!

I just use three sizes of circles. I make a couple large ones, a couple medium ones, a couple or three small ones,  then a couple mediums and then do it again. You see how I change not only the size of the circle but how far out to the side it goes, which gives the column wavy sides.

After I make that first wavy-sided column (starting around the middle of my piece) then I come back alongside it with a new column. With this new column I still vary the small medium and large circles but I don't worry about keeping as strict of a pattern as I did with the first column, I just make sure that I fill in up to the edge of the previous column, and that I keep the other edge wavy. It's the wavy edges to the columns that keeps this looking really organic and forgiving of errors. So pay attention to keeping your free edge wavy instead of trying to keep a rigid pattern going.

So, would you like to see me stitching it? Awesome, because I filmed over six minutes of that. This video has no narration because the toddler was napping in the adjacent room and I love you, but not enough to wake up a sleeping kid by yammering about free motion quilting. Also, I had to put my iPad on some books to film it so when you see me raising my wrist really awkwardly it's because I haven't perfected that setup yet and the books were in my way.



Let me know if you like the no-narration video thing. I can definitely do more of those!

As with all free-motion designs please give yourself the gift of doodling them first before you get your sewing machine involved. You'll be glad you did! And of course I'd love to hear how it goes if you use this design on your quilt. Happy stitching!

A sadness

This beautiful woman, my grandmother, my favorite quilter and undoubtedly my biggest fan, has died. She introduced me to quilting, taught me to thread a needle and make bread. She loved and laughed and encouraged my wild adventures (and even took some with me). Her name was Mary Ann, and I will miss her so much.

There is no good way to write a post like this but I have talked about her so often on this blog, dedicated my book to her, and written an article about her (that's what she's holding in the picture), there is no way not to talk about it. She has been a force in my life and her loss takes the wind out of my sails. I really don't know anyone quite like her, she was special. 

Before returning home after her funeral I went through her sewing room to see what needed finishing. On her design wall she had a quilt block from an improv sewing day we had together last year. 

She had three unfinished quilts, intended for my youngest sisters. Her sister (also a quilter) and I made plans to finish them. And I labeled her quilts. There were 29 of them that I knew to be hers that had neither name nor date. I made my best guesses for the year, and I suppose I know better than anyone else now so it will have to do.  

I loved getting to see her work again. I was inspired all over, just as I had been over a decade ago when she showed me how vivid quilting could be. I enjoyed speaking with her quilting friends at her funeral, it was such a joyful and fulfilling part of her life, as it is for me.

My heart inclines toward her often and I have to remember that she is gone, will always be gone. I can only remember her, and carry forward the gifts that she gave to me. Even in my grief I know how lucky I am to have known her and received her love. 

Thanks to everyone who's left loving comments on this post. It is so nice to have your understanding and kindness. I have responded when I had an email address. 

All true

This has been an incredible month.

My husband and I returned to the Burning Man festival together, thanks to my dad watching our kids for a week. The treadle sewing machine did not make it this time due to some space concerns. Next year, though, I'll make sure it comes with us! Burning Man was again beyond description. What a fun place to help create for a few magical days.

We got back and the big kid started kindergarten. We are officially a school family. I love making the lunches and walking to school. I mean, so far. We've only been at it a week, after all!

And then I made a thrilling trip to Denver, Colorado to visit every quilter's favorite startup, Craftsy! That's right, I got my chance to visit the magical land of cameras and makeup artists and spent two and a half days on the set sharing some of the fun things I love about free-motion quilting. The class is now in their hands for a couple of months and you know I will tell you all about it when it launches!

This brings me to an interesting moment with quilting. Until now I've thought of myself as a nurse-midwife who has a quilting blog. But now, with both the Craftsy class and my second book on the horizon, it's clear that I have a part-time career in quilting, not just the occasional free-motion quilting class.

I've lately avoided talking about my two worlds together, not sure if the quilting makes me seem less serious as a midwife, or if the midwifery makes me seem like an interloper in the professional quilting world. Now, I've decided I'm over that caution. I'm a midwife and I'm a quilter, and other people's perceptions of those two facts together are not really important. I enjoy them both. I'm doing them both. Together they are exactly the right balance for me and they complement each other so well. Maybe I'll talk more about that in the future. I'm having a hard time finding the words right now.

Anyway, I'm back and I hope to see you around as my world gets back to normal! I have some fresh FMQ designs to share with you, I can't wait. If I can just get the toddler to nap while the kindergartener is kindergartening we'll be in business.