It's Spring

Life became hectic and now I'm relearning how to use my Handi Quilter.

After avoiding it for ages, with two charity quilts and five of my own, I really had to bite the bullet and get back into the good space that I was in six months ago.

So...

Small Sudoku quilt is loaded and ready to go. Yes I had problems with the tension, the thread, the needle and the frame level, however, all problems seem to have been solved - some hours later.

Now I am selecting a digital design from my growing collection.

Looks sweet. It was made using the leftover bits from my first Sudoku quilt. I note that I have to smooth the side but I haven't tensioned the sides yet.

Back on track

It's March and I've just started quilting again. Don't know what happened in January or February. I did do quite a bit of piecing, binding of quilts, putting on hanging sleeves and a major sort of my ridiculously large stash. It's now organised into colours, projects and solids. This unearthed some UFO's which I have been finishing - you know - adding borders, completing that last row, fixing up the dodgy block that caused me to hide the top in a box.

Projects

Now I have some exciting projects to quilt. Photos later but...

1. "Child's Play" by Zen Chic - definitely a keep.

2. "Lollipop" - finally finished last year and now I have decided how to quilt it. More on that later.

3. "Boy Crazy"  Charity quilt for Anne's group- my first charity quilt.

4. Fig Tree Jelly Roll Race. Made last year and now I know how I will quilt this one. This will go to Zoe and I think she will really love the quilt design.

Digitized designs

This is what happened. For quite a while I have admired many quilts and quilting designs. I've tried free hand and using rulers and templates and I am not very happy with my skill. On the other hand I have found that I can use computerized quilting (QBot) and vary given designs to fit my quilts.

I decided to search for digitized designs and eventually found a few web sites that offered these, so this started the experiment of downloading files - making sure that they were the correct format for my QBot, saving them on computer, transferring to an SD card, testing them on my Handi Quilter.

Yay! Success - after a few minor glitches. Only one web site provided scales and units of measurement so I've had fun quilting practice designs and finding out the dimensions of each design. These designs will allow me some breathing space while I improve my free hand quilting skills.

Design Software

I wondered how people made these digitized designs so yet another search led to a very promising program. It's called Art and Stitch. There are so many things that can be done with this program and of course the last is saving the program in the format for many different longarm quilting machines. Handi Quilter and QBot are included so I could use it.

A trial copy can be downloaded - with minimal save features, however it will enable me to decide if this is the program for me. Yes, it's pricey but this is my life and major hobby.

I've watched a number of tutorials and videos on this software- looks promising. But for now - I'll use the designs that I've downloaded and quilt the above four quilts.