Session 5: Ready to Quilt

You've got the machine in your home, it fits, and now you're ready to quilt. But first things first, I want you to have technical proficiency. And the way you get that is through learning how to do a step over and over in the exact same manner. And the first thing is how to thread the machine. The two major causes of frustration and poor stitch quality that you will experience with any sewing machine, but it's magnified with a longarm are caused by incorrect threading or incorrect tension. If you can master threading and tension, you're going to be just fine. So this is the side of the machine where you're going to thread it. You thread from the side. Every machine is different, but they're pretty similar. So the thread rests on a cone and on this machine it comes up and goes through several different guides. Through the intermittent tensioner, comes down through another series of guides, through the main tensioner, up through the take-up lever and down through a few more guides and through the needle. Very very similar to most machines. And you will have to get your owner's manual out or pay attention during your classes or have your dealer show you. What I found is the best way for people to learn about threading their machine is take your current cone of thread, leave about, Oh, a good 12 inches or so, snip it and tie on another cone of thread. Just tie it with an overhand knot and gently pull it through the machine. And I want you to watch the thread path. Where is it going? This trick will save you a lot of time when you're changing quilting threads. As long as the machine is threaded fine you can tie on, tie off, pull it through and then you're just threading at the needle. You want to check your tension but you should be good to go. You don't have to rethread the machine every single time. But there will come a time that you're going to have a breakage. Somewhere along the line, the thread is going to break and you won't be able to tie on, so you need to know how to thread that machine. sit here and watch that thread path and pull it through and make sure you understand how it's going through and how it's going through each of the different parts. On mine, I want to show you a couple of photos here. This is the intermittent thread tensioner. So it comes through this little guide, up and around, and then it goes over this wheel. I have to get it just in that little wheel just right or it's not turning correctly and it messes up the tension. The intermittent tensioner is where most of your adjustments are going to be done. You need to be checking and adjusting your tension before, during and even after you quilt a row, you want to look at it and make sure that tension is really doing what you want. The primary tensioner, you come from there through a few more guides and here's that primary tensioner, depending on what you're quilting, typically you go around it twice and then come back through the check spring under this little arm and then up into the take-up lever. This tension, as you can see, there's no marks on it. You're, again, flying by the seat of your pants. But it's typically out just about even with a screw or a little bit further, it's fairly loose. Again, my adjustments are done over here at the intermittent tensioner. So you can, after a while, you'll tell when you're pulling it through just before it gets to the needle, if the tension feels about right, you're going to be able to get in the ballpark, but then I definitely want you to do some stitching. The next thing after you get the threading down is of course the bobbin, the number one thing, make sure it's in correctly in the right direction. You want to come through that little guide slot. And then as you come around, you're going to listen for a click. It's very faint, but there's a distinct click. And that's when you'll know you're in the little hole right here and your bobbin case is correctly loaded. Then we're going to insert the bobbin case into the machine. This is what it looks like underneath your needle, there's your hopper foot in your needle and the bobbin mechanism is directly underneath. This will get inserted and you don't hold it by this lever. You only use the lever, the lever when you're taking it out of the machine, that little lever to pull it out. But when you slip it in, you're holding it on either side. You want to put it into the machine here and hear a click. It is a distinct click. If you don't hear the click, it's not seated correctly. And the case and the bobbin will fall out and you can damage it. So you want it seated correctly. It will rock just slightly back and forth. And here's what it looks like when it's in the machine. And then to remove it, you use the little handle and just pull it out. So this is very important. When you're making the adjustments for your tension, again, you're using the little screw on the side, and you're just turning it no more than a quarter of a turn. Again righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. If you move the screw to the right, it will become tighter tension. If you move the screw to the left, it will be looser tension. Hence righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. It's a good way to remember that. Now I want to show you some samples of why we check during quilting and why we definitely do samples as we start. As you look at this sample, the stitching looks beautiful on the front. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a good sample. When you turn it on the back though, and you examine very, very closely. You can see here, these, the thread is being pulled and there's almost what we call eyelashes. It looks like little tiny eyelashes on here. That is not good tension. This can pull out. It is poor quality. It needs to be fixed. What's happening here is the top thread is coming through to the bottom. So you either need to tighten the top thread at that intermittent tension, or you need to come down on your bobbin and make the bobbin thread looser, adjust the screw to the left. The first option is to do what you can at the top of the machine. That's why I like to get the bobbin close. And I take, on my bobbins, I have several different bobbin cases, and I actually have set them up for different types of threads. Like this is for rainbows, which is why this thread was a little tight in it. This is not rainbow thread. But I mark an abbreviation on there so I know which bobbin case is for which thread. And that gets me in the ballpark. Then when I go to quilt an actual quilt the top thread may or may not be the same. So then I go in and I adjust my tension and I check it before I start. Over here you can see that there's little threads that are sticking out that have little loops. Again, that could be from either needing a new needle in the machine, or it could be again, a tension issue. It could even be an issue with your thread. So always check your tension. Another thing I like to do when I'm checking tension, on the side and I'll show you when we load, you're going to have a little extra backing, batting and top fabric that you can play with. And do some stars, do some loops, do some swirls. That will give you the best guide of what's going on on the back. So I don't want to see those eyelashes. I also, in my point of the stars is a good place to see what the tension is doing for when you come out, is it pulling at the points? If it is that something that needs to be adjusted. Again if you see it on the backside, the top thread is too loose. If it's pulling to the top and doing this, then you need to loosen it, so the threads are going back to the bottom side. It's a game of back and forth. Ideally the tension meets in the middle batting. So tension is critical. And don't feel alone on this. When I worked at Quilter's Newsletter Magazine, we would get the most beautiful quilts in the entire world coming in for the magazine for articles. I cannot tell you how many quilts I saw the front quilting was magnificent, it was to die for, but when you turned it to the back, it was not technically correct. There were tension problems. And especially if you're going to be a professional quilter quilting for hire, you do not want the quilts going out of your studio looking like those quilts were. You want good tension, you don't want eyelashes, you don't want pulls. Take your time and learn to be comfortable with tension. If you had a home economics teacher who slapped your hand and said, never touched the bobbin tension, well maybe not in her class, but if you are a longarm quilter, you're going to be playing with that tension all the time. So get comfortable with it. All right, so let's get this quilt loaded. I want to show you how to load a quilt on a machine. You're going to, first off I'm going to show you, this is the leader. You have three different leaders on there. You have the pick up, the lining and the top. The pickup is the top roller and this would be how it would be attached to the machine. When I have my batting, or my backing and my quilt, and even my batting, I want to go ahead and fold it in half, every direction, down the sides and top and bottom. And just put a pin in there to mark it. These pins are going to be your guides. The ones on the side are important because they let you know on your quilt when you're getting to the halfway point so you can start adjusting your pantograph patterns if you need to, if you see that you're running a little short or a little long. So these are good indicators. I also put my pins top and bottom. This is critical. Because will help ensure that I mount this quilt as square as possible to the machine. I take the fabric with the wrong side up, I want to see the back of the fabric, because as it's on the machine, this is your backing. You're going to layer on your batting and then your quilt top. So I take this and I'm going to be pinning it. In fact, let me turn this around as if I was at the machine. If I'm at the machine, I have to walk to either side to pin. So I'm taking this batting. And I'm marking it with the zero mark on my tape. That's where my pin lines up. And I simply put a pin in parallel to the leader. Just like that. And it should be within a quarter of an inch. And I want to keep this backing fabric straight along the edge. The more you do this, the easier it becomes. The next pin goes five inches away. The next pin goes 10 inches away. My fabric isn't quite wide enough so I'm just going to put it there. Then you're going to come back in the opposite direction. And in between those five inch marks, you put another pin. Believe it or not, this is the absolute fastest way to pin on. I learned it from Linda Taylor who's one of the best pioneers in the industry. And she did time motion studies on it and found out that this is indeed the fastest way to pin on. So again, every five inches. Then come back and pin in between. What you're doing is you want your pins head to toe like this. And this will make sure that as the fabric is pulled by the rollers, there will be tension there that it's not shifting. Then you're going to come down and do it on the opposite end on the lining roller, pull that up and over and put it on. Let me show you what this looks like. Once you get that part pinned, it will look like this on the machine. And you have brought that lining roller up and over your belly bar. That's the top roller is called the belly bar. You can see that it's pinned along. And then you take your clamps. The clamps clamp to either side, you typically will have six clamps. There are different types of clamps you can buy. These were just pretty much my original clamps and they are on Velcro. So you can adjust the length of the clamp. You want it to be firm, but you don't necessarily want to bounce a quarter off it. I don't want it that tight. If it's too tight, your needle deflects, it distorts the stitches and you're going to start breaking needles. The next step is to put your batting on. I like to put the batting right up to the edge of that leader, where it was pinned. Then you're going to take your channel lock and engage it and do a line of basting all the way across to hold down the batting. The batting just floats free, it is not attached to a roller. So if you have any extra, it just goes underneath the machine. Once you have the batting attached, then you come back to where that line was. Let me put this back in. The blue line there of quilting that I have, that is where I'm lining up my quilt top. So it looks like this. Once I have that lined up, I'm going to come along and the hopping foot is a quarter of an inch. If you notice, you can just see some space there. So I'm to the inside of it. I'm a little more, I'm probably about three sixteenths of an inch away from the edge of the fabric. I come along, put my channel lock on and stitch the quilt down again with the basting stitch. Whatever you do, I cannot emphasize this enough. Do not run over that pin. I left it here for demonstration purposes to show how I can line up the center of my quilt top now with the center of the backing so that everything's nice and even and square. If you run over this pin, most likely you will throw the machine out of timing, you will break the needle and you could break your needle bar. These are expensive fixes. So don't sew over that pin, whatever you do. Once you get that on, the top is stitched, you can see it's stitched all the way across. Take a quilting ruler, hold it at a 45 degree angle and you're going to come down the quilt just scraping it gently, if you will, to get all of the bubbles out. You can also lift the quilt up first and pull your batting gently to get it as smooth as possible. Make sure after you go ahead and come down with your other channel locks on, you're going to stitch on either side. The channel locks will help keep it square. Make sure you look underneath and double check that you have no wrinkles under the quilt that it is nice and smooth and taut. Now, what you're going to do is you're going to start quilting. The order of quilting is you stitch in the ditch first for all the major areas. You would start out here and you would do your borders. Then you would do any sashing and any blocks. You can baste as you go, if needed. In other words, once I get the quilt anchor down, I'm going to undo the clamps, I'm going to roll everything forward, I'm going to repeat the process of coming down vertically on the quilt to anchor it, continue doing my stitching, the stitch in the ditch portions. And then when I get to the bottom, I'm going to go across the bottom of the quilt and make sure it's nice and even. You can also then, once the stitch in the ditch is done, come in, the first thing you would do are your borders. Do your sashing, do your blocks, drop your patterns in. When I say baste as you go, if you've got a large area in here that has no blocks or no need for stitch in the ditch, take an even larger basting stitch, about an inch to an inch and a half, and just put your channel locks and go across and baste it down, you don't have to pin it. This is the joy of a longarm, no more pinning. Go across and then as you come back to sew, you just take out the basting. If you're doing a pantograph, you go ahead, once this is all stitched on the top with the basting, there is no stitch in the ditch with a pantograph. The pantograph is going over everything. It's going over the blocks, the sashing, whatever it's one pattern goes top to bottom edge to edge. You are going to do as many rows as will fit under your quilt or under the arm of your quilting machine. And then you will roll the quilt again, baste the sides, and then continue doing your pantograph. And that is how you get nice square quilts. And if you can master these technical skills of threading, tension and how to mount a quilt you will have beautiful quilts and save yourself a lot of headaches.