One of my YouTube viewers, Carol, asked me how I was coming along using my Grace frame with the 1600P and as it happens, I had just started working on a baby quilt with this set-up.
When you have so many different interests, it takes some time before the cycle comes full-circle and you are using a piece of equipment again. I told my hubby it was like my stuffed animals when I was little: I had to rotate through each one so they all got a turn being snuggled. If I don't use one particular machine for a while I feel it deserves its turn and I have to find a project in order to make use of it. (Ok, maybe this is actually my wandering mind ready for a new adventure!)
The baby quilt panel is the one I found buried in my knitting bag so I thought I would use it to get re-acquainted with my frame. No problems loading it up...BUT...once I was back quilting, I had terrible problems with thread tension and thread breaking. Quilting on a frame is pretty fun when everything works as it should. When you have to stop and fix a problem after every 3 inches of stitching? It's terribly frustrating! I was seriously ready to dismantle the whole thing after a day of struggling to get things right. The issues I had made a terrible mess of the quilt and although this was only a cheater panel, it could have been a cute donation quilt. Unfortunately, it could not be saved and became another practice scrap.
I ended up taking the machine off the frame in order to get the tension setting adjusted. This itself is a lengthy process since in addition to removing all the wires and clips to unload the HEAVY machine, I have to move my other machine, set up a table, and change the foot on the 1600. Once I got the tension right and everything back on the frame, it took several passes to trouble-shoot the thread breaking. I changed the needle twice; I raised the front bar of the frame to get a more level quilt; I changed bobbin thread and top thread (switching to an orange cotton thread so I could check if the bobbin thread was coming through or not). I did end up with some nice stitching but the only recipient of this baby quilt is my fur baby!
I know that quilting on a frame takes practice. It takes a lot of control to get the precise stitching desired. As long as everything is WORKING I know I will eventually gain that control and achieve the designs I want. My problem is that every piece can't be a practice quilt and since it takes so long to get a quilt top ready, (and I don't want to mess it up!), how will I ever get the time and quantity of materials needed to improve?? I know I could just use my frame to meander or loop-de-doo and get quilts quilted, but the custom quilter in me WANTS the challenge of Angela Walters-type quilting. I want to be GOOD and I don't want to give up! Part of me is frustrated by the limitations of this set-up (ie. 5" of quilting space) but part of me is thankful I didn't invest $10K+ in a professional long-arm because I don't have confidence that I will ever improve enough! Even with the few projects I have quilted on the frame I have come across questions I haven't answered yet, like how do you quilt vertical lines? How can you keep lines straight without a channel lock function? How do I quilt motifs in blocks larger than 5"? How can you possibly fix screw-ups when the quilt is already on the frame or the stitches are so small you can't pick them out???
I haven't decided the fate of this set-up yet. If it works, then I DO enjoy the challenge of improving my custom quilting. I will not come to any decisions until next year when my kids are away at school and I will (hopefully!) have more time to experiment and practice. I recently saw a locally posted ad for my exact frame & machine and basically, the person was GIVING AWAY the machine with the frame. It was a great deal if someone was looking to have this arrangement but I realize that I will never get back what I spent on my own set-up so I might as well keep it now and spend the rest of my life trying to get better at using it! That, or sell the frame, keep the 1600P (because it does free-motion quilt nicely) or trade it all in and get the bad-boy embroidery machine I REALLY want! (There's that attention-deficit mind again!)
I really like the quilting that you showed in the photos, so even though it sounds like it was a royal hassle to get it done, at least it came out looking really good!
Posted by: Patsy Thompson | May 12, 2013 at 09:10 PM