A couple of weeks ago, Matt and I took a class at Central Sewing. The store had brought in Hattie Brown, an HQ Educator, so she could teach Edmontonians about this fabulous quilting set up. The morning class was an introduction to the machine, and she taught us about weight of thread, what size of needles to use, how to load quilts, what direction to quilt and so much more. We learned about features we did not even now we had! Hattie is a great speaker and she kept the class thoroughly engaged for the morning.

Hattie brought some samples of her work on the HQ. One quilt that I found to be exceptional was an heirloom, trapunto quilt done wholecloth style. She told us that Karen McTavish had been her teacher for the project. That was pretty exciting to me, since I am a big fan of Karen’s. I would love to take a class with her! She also showed us samples of all the groovy board templates which are available for the HQ. One awesome tip she shared with us was to pause in the corners of templates to form right angles, rather than rounded corners.

tags: hattie brown

Here are some pics from last week, we had such a good week . We spent alot of time offline playing with the HQ16. Here are a few pics of some of the practice runs we made. Bradie was so happy when I came home with a bolt of ikea Muslin to practice on. At $3.99/M you can't go wrong.





Here is a pattern we followed with the laser stylus. It was really easy to use and if this is how good it looks first run, wait till we get good at it. I tried some micro stippling of sorts as well.










Before long patterns just sort of flow on to your textile canvas. This one turned out a little aztec or egyptian.







Here's a shot of what the kids see as Marching Elephants. I see it a bit but am going to mess around with the number of legs and size of ears. This would be a really fun pattern to try on a kids jungle quilt.





Bradie's playing with the idea of blistery breeze.






Second Oldest daughters first attempt at Graffiti slye writing. She wants to practice with different colour threads. I think it will look great in orange red and yellow







I couldn't believe when Bradie whipped this off. She's such a natural at quilting, I 'm happy to have some one to learn from and with. What a great flower. Again, can't wait to see it in color. or on a quilt.







Some of Bradie's first McCtavishing on the longarm.








We had originally picked out a bunch of different templates for the machine, but weren't happy with the way they looked on fabric. We traded them in for these great templates. They are ideal for blocks up to 12.5 inches. We got both squares and circles. As you can see my stylus wasn't quite low enough and some of the lines are little wavy.

tags: Pattern, free motion quilting, beginner

Hi this is Matt with QuiltCetera.Com. I spend a lot of time quilting and not much time blogging. I am going to be catching you all up on some of my most recent projects.

Today I want to talk about a pile of panels I bought months ago and forgot I had. Bradie sent me out to the local fabric store to buy her 4 matching panels with a children's theme. I came home with about 40 panels of various themes.

Luckily I remebered panels for Bradie and she whipped off a Baby Rag Time Tutorial.

I had all but forgotten about the other panels, until yesterday, while cleaning out the crawl space, I came across this huge bag full of panels. As I came up the stairs I noticed the HQ16 was empty and I knew if I jumped on it I could have a project whipped off in no time at all. I honestly didn't expect it to go so fast.

I loaded Three Rag quilts at the same time

This took a total of 12 panels and an hour and a half to load the long arm,
quilt the lines across the quilts, slash cut between the seams, unload the Long arm.

Now all I need to do is Bind the three quilts. I'm amazed how much time I saved on this project using the HQ16!

tags: rag quilt, long arm machine