Machine quilting Archives - Gray Barn Designs

I’ve been cleaning closets–not much fun! BUT I found a hidden treasure to make it all worthwhile.

Several years ago, we were skiing in Canada and I stumbled across The Sugar Pine Company in Canmore, Alberta. This is a delightful quilt shop in an incredibly beautiful region of Canada.

I purchased a kit to make this Hare Bells Mini Quilt (designed by Castilleja Cotton) and brought it home to promptly place it in the black hole, also known as my sewing room closet! Once I re-found this treasure, I spent a few evenings working on it and am very happy with the results!

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I had some green pearl embroidery cotton to use for the stems so I put clear thread in my machine and used a zig-zag stitch to tack the stems in place. I like this thicker embroidery cotton because it adds a three dimensional look AND it was very easy to make the stems bend and curve.

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Raw edge applique is a fairly new technique for me and I think I might be hooked after making this mini! I used fabric glue to tack the leaves and flowers to the background and then I just started sewing back and forth around each leaf and flower. I took a deep breath when I started doing machine outlines on the cream background but I eventually remembered to exhale and just kept sewing away.

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Mini quilts are a nice way to practice machine quilting because there isn’t a lot of fabric to manipulate and it’s easy to turn your work and sew as you go.

Do you have any tips and tricks for raw edge applique? Let us know — we’d love to hear from you!

I’ve really tried to like quilting on my sewing machine but am having a very troublesome time of it, woe is me!

In my post on August 11, 2016 , I mentioned I was making a sewing machine cover for my mom’s sewing machine. Well, here is the final result. I had a lot of fun planning and piecing this cover, figuring out the necessary dimensions and even sewing it together…but the machine quilting part, not so much! It looks good from a distance.

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We are honing in on a closer view and it still looks reasonable…but wait! There’s more!

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When I started the machine quilting, I made a valiant attempt to do meandering loops, but things quickly turned on me!

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This is just one hot mess of quilting loops and jagged sewing lines. My stitches are less than even because I was dragging the quilt sandwich around with my feed dogs down…talk about downward dog (oops thinking ahead to my yoga class tonight!). I digress…

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I even thought I would try the meandering stitch on my machine (note white in upper right and lower left pinwheel in photo below). I quickly realized this wasn’t a good solution but I wasn’t willing to give up! I kept making jagged loops and lines until I was done. Finally, I resorted to a decorative zigzag stitch to hem this sewing machine cover and bring my woeful attempt at machine quilting to completion.

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