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Tessellation Week 7, and a Craftsy Giveaway!

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Welcome to week 7, as we sew up the Tessellation quilt pattern by Alison Glass and Nydia Kehnle. This week, I’m going to talk a little bit about machine quilting with your walking foot.

Every Monday, I will post a quick photo tutorial for each week’s block for those of you that are new to foundation paper-piecing (however, you will still need to purchase the pattern in order to complete the quilt – I will not be providing any templates on my blog).

If you are sewing along, feel free to post your progress photos on your preferred social media (Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) and use the tag #TessellationSAL and #alisonglass so we can see what you’re making!

The schedule:

  • July 14 – Get your pattern (and optional triangle ruler) here. Select your fabric, and begin by cutting all ‘A’ triangles.
  • July 21 – Assemble all ‘B’ triangles.
  • July 28 – Assemble all ‘C’ triangles.
  • August 4 – Assemble all ‘D’ triangles.
  • August 11 – Assemble all ‘E’ triangles.
  • August 18 – Assemble all ‘F’ triangles.
  • August 25 – Complete the quilt top. I’ll share some ideas for quilting.
  • September 1 – Enter your completed quilt top to be eligible for PRIZES!!

Before I get into some walking foot fun, don’t forget that NEXT MONDAY is when you’ll be able to enter your Tessellation Quilt top, right here on my blog, to be eligible to win some prizes!!

 

 

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Be sure to read to the end of this post for a fun giveaway!

To get ready for machine quilting my quilt, I watched a class on Craftsy by Jacquie Gering called ‘Creative Quilting with Your Walking Foot’. This portion of my post is sponsored by Craftsy, although all words and opinions are my own. 🙂 Craftsy classes are usually each several-hours-long classes, each focusing on a specific technique or project. Once you purchase a class (and there are also several free classes to get your feet wet), it stays in your account forever, so you can watch it at any time.  The ones that I have gotten in the past year have all been for either areas that I need to tighten up on, or for projects that I really want to make, and it’s nice to know that I can watch at my leisure.

If you’re not familiar with Jacquie Gering, she blogs at Tallgrass Prairie Studio and is a huge player in modern quilting. She’ll be lecturing again at QuiltCon in 2015, and she also happens to live in Chicago too! I am not a strong machine quilter. I only have to do it a few times a year, and sometimes I think, the less the better, but it’s always frightening doing something that you are not confident about or when you don’t really know what you’re doing.

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What I liked about ‘Creative Quilting with Your Walking Foot’ from the get-go is that Jacquie makes no assumptions about what you do or do not already know about walking foot quilting. The class starts out with a 25-minute segment discussing what a walking foot is, which parts of the foot will give you what measurements, and how to prepare your quilt for machine quilting. There were several portions of this segment that I found fascinating; first was the discussion of using painter’s tape to mark off your lines for quilting (pictured above), and second was that preparation of the quilt before beginning is VERY IMPORTANT. Jacquie stresses this several times, so I know it must be so. I think we all know that we need to press our quilt top and quilt backing well, but it never even occurred to me that the batting should be pressed as well. Jacquie also presses the whole quilt sandwich again after she spray bastes (although discussion is also given to pin basting). Fasinating.

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Lesson 2 of the class is a 39-minute session where Jacquie talks about using the painter’s tape to mark off what she calls a Baseline (that center blue tape) and Registration Marks (subsequent markings, such as the left-hand piece of tape). Instead of just having that center line and using your walking foot to continue quilting every 1/4″ or what have you, Jacquie strongly suggests placing registration marks every few inches, to correct any veering and keep you on point. In Lesson 2 Jacquie also talks about up-and-down straight lines (Matchstick Quilting) and a crosshatch (Diamond) design. I really especially love the Diamond quilt design, and it looks easy as well as beautiful.

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The next lesson, lesson 3 (27 minutes long), discusses how to use decorative stitches on your sewing machine and which will give you a serpentine stitch, diamond serpentine, and scallop. These decorative stitches are where using those Registration Marks I talked about above, will be absolutely vital, especially because the stitches are curved. I especially liked how Jacquie showed how to start in the middle of the curved stitch (for example, if you run out of bobbin thread) so that it looks continuous.

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Next up is radiating quilting, or the Spirograph, which is an 18-minute lesson. I like the idea of using this type of quilting because you can call attention to a certain focal point on the quilt. I like using large-scale prints in quilts when possible, so I think this would be great for what I like to do. For this type of quilting, Jacquie uses a single piece of painter’s tape to start out with, for her focal point and the first line of stitching. Once that first line is stitched, the same piece of tape is moved the correct interval and then stitched. For more than one focal point (the focal point is where all those lines are connecting, at the bottom right), Jacquie stresses to only stitch to one focal point at a time, as it’s easy to get lost if you’re trying to do several at a time. I hadn’t ever thought of doing this type of quilting before, but after I watched this segment of the class, I was really intrigued and I think I will try that with my Tessellation quilt.

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Up next at 26 minutes long is a lesson on curved quilting, as you can see in the photo above. The curved quilting really compliments the piecing of the quilt. Because this class is about quilting with a walking foot, Jacquie shows how to do a gentle curve (which could also be done with free motion), but your hands and the walking foot are in control here. Jacquie showed another class sample (which I have to show you also because I absolutely love):

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Hello nelly!! Isn’t that awesome?! That would be beautiful as Jacquie has suggested with pieced squares (pretend squares are shown on the right), as the machine quilting would provide lots of visual interest to the squares. The squares also provide guidelines for the curved quilting, and it actually looks like I could do it!

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Lesson 6 is 21 minutes and talks about echoing, both in a circle/spiral and in other shapes (such as this square, pictured above). I have done an echoing circle before with my walking foot, and I found it to be fairly easy, but I felt unsure about echoing other designs, that is, until I watched this class.

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OMG I had to say that Lesson 7, quilting text into your quilt, was MINDBLOWING. I had no idea I could do this on my home machine (I’ve only ever seen quilted text on my friend Thomas’s quilt that Lisa Sipes longarmed, called ‘Martha’). You’re telling me I can do this…little ole me…that’s crazy talk! But as you can see by Jacquie’s quilt, above, which she showed during her class, the words ‘kansas city’ are quilted in the negative space of this quilt. Jacquie says the simpler the letter for the text, the better. I’m going to show you another close-up photo because I am so fascinated by this. You have to watch the video to get all the details, but here’s another glimpse at the magic:

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Finally, there’s a last lesson regarding rolling/folding your quilt through your machine, ripping stitches, and how to decide which quilting design works best with your particular quilt.

Well, I’ve written a lot here and shown you a lot of images from this Craftsy class (I just screenshot from the parts that I find are the most fascinating!). It’s so funny that I wasn’t even expecting 1/3 of the information presented here, but a wealth of information was presented in the, oh, 4 hours that the class spans. That’s a lot, isn’t it?! I think well worth the money, if you are finding yourself needing help in this area like I was (or if you just want to expand your horizons and try out some new-to-you methods!).  Again, if you’re interested in Jacquie Gering’s ‘Creative Quilting with Your Walking Foot’, you can find the class right here. As an added bonus, as with all Craftsy classes, Jacquie is available to answer all your questions throughout the video, and you can see what questions other people were asking for that particular sequence of the video.

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As far as my Tessellation Quilt goes for the sew along, I have decided to use Jacquie’s radiating method as described in her Craftsy class. Here’s my quilt, and here is the first of two focal points that I have chosen to quilt with my walking foot. How are you going to quilt your quilt?

I hope you’ve enjoyed my review of the Craftsy class ‘Creative Quilting with Your Walking Foot‘. If you’re interested in taking this class, sign up here after you enter the giveaway! Craftsy has generously allowed me to give away this class to one of my lucky readers. To enter the giveaway, click right here!

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7 thoughts on “Tessellation Week 7, and a Craftsy Giveaway!

  1. Cheryl says:

    Thanks for the class review. It’s very helpful to hear another quilters take on a class; this one is definately on my list now!

  2. Sara says:

    I think I’m going to hand quilt mine with diagonal lines along the triangle edges. I’d like to practice my machine quilting with some smaller pieces first, plus I like having something portable to work on.

  3. green231 says:

    I bought one of her other classes and it was excellent.

  4. This looks like a great class, thanks for the review!

  5. Gina S. says:

    I would love to take this class. But with my server i can’t watch videos without going over my limit 🙁 .

  6. Pattie C says:

    Never thought I could make curves with my walking foot. I might have to check this out.

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