On Deck - Girl Gang DIY Sampler - quilting the quilt on the Luminaire

The Girl Gang quilt is finally on deck. This is the project I was looking for last week, and finally found it Monday morning. Yay!

While working on the recent baby quilt, I had a little epiphany about quilting; specifically, how to get it done with less angst, aggravation and still be happy about it. Y’all know I have been digitizing some edge-to-edge designs but I also want to make some block-specific background designs—think Kimberbell’s background quilting and Designs by Juju’s backdrops. Combine that idea with the Brother Luminaire’s ability to scan a design from the quilt, add a built-in quilting design to it, and “erasing” the portions of the block that you don’t want the machine to stitch, and suddenly your brain blows up with possibilities. At least, mine does.

But even with the Luminaire's lovely built-in edge-to-edge designs, they are not all encompassing and don't necessarily work with what I have to quilt. Also, I learned that the only way you can add designs to work with that feature is to create them in Brother's PE-Design 11 software, which is now selling for $2,000--and I'm not buying it. 

When I fished the quilt out of its hiding place (an unmarked Bin under the cutting table), I was surprised to see how much of it was already quilted. I'm guessing about 15% of it is done, and most of that is in the various coping strips, the center block and the long tree with the cardinal (background quilting only). Not a lot, but still a happy surprise. This quilt measures approximately 61" x 71". The center block, the largest, is partially quilted in the background. I am considering removing the quilting in that block. 

Lots to think about, but too much to overthink. That's my mantra this year.

A little bit of background on this quilt. All of the applique was drawn in Electric Quilt 7 on another laptop. I printed the applique templates, traced them on to the back of either Steam-a-Seam Lite or Heatnbond Lite, adhered them to the blocks, and raw-edge appliqued each piece to the block with a straight stitch. That was 10 years ago, and long before I knew anything about ITH applique or digitizing for applique.

A few of the blocks are larger than my largest hoop, and those designs will have to be split. But before we run away with the big blocks, I decided to start small, and while not the smallest, this block is 5" finished -- a little bee. There are four bee blocks in the quilt and each is oriented differently. I located the project file and exported to my cloud drive a JPG of the line drawings. 

Folks, remember--it's supposed to be primitive.

I imported the bee block line drawing into Embrilliance, traced the appliqué pieces, created an outline of the bee shape, and added a stippling design to the background. While it was a fairly easy and painless thing to do, I am generally not a fan of a lot of embroidery softwares’ versions of their built-in stippling designs—to me, they look like a circuit board schematic, and do not remotely resemble stippling, and that's not good for a primitive style quilt. If the block that you're stippling is small such as the little bee above, there's only so much manipulating you can do with a built-in function before it goes off the rails.

 I revisited the idea of a motif for a background fill. I tried a diamond background which was nice, but I'm planning to use that in some of the other blocks:

Then I thought about a hexagon. Embrilliance has several motifs in their application, but not a hexagon. Embrilliance has built-in shapes, including a hexagon. I opened the shape, created the motif, and loved what it did to the background of the block. I played with it a bit to try to bring the hexagon together to resemble a honeycomb, but honestly, I’m so tickled with what I did that I thought I would roll with it. The stitch-out told me I have more work to do—for some unknown reason, I did not run the simulator to see how the stitching would run, and it would have clued me in why the number of stitches for a 5” block was 3,000+! 

I worked on it again on Thursday, but something wasn't clicking. Again—lots to think about, but too much to overthink.

Friday when I moved back into the sewing room, I thought about how I may be going completely out of sequence for what I want to do in Embrilliance, but had another idea. I drew some hexagons that were not connecting, but clustered together. Tested the stitch-out and thought, that's nice! 

One of the things that I get slightly frustrated with any quilting in the hoop on no matter what brand of machine, is the alignment of everything in the hoop so that the stars and flowers and cats and dogs rejoice and dance in the streets. I know I've mentioned this before. The size of this thing doesn't help. 

BUT, I remembered--I can scan the quilt from the bed of the machine using the camera, bring in the stitch file, and line it up that way. 

Oh, I do love my Luminaire. And this one will take awhile. Stay tuned for more wins and losses. 

I’m scheduled for my second cataract surgery on Monday, but we are still iced in. I’ve called the surgeon’s office, and guess what? No one is there, and that’s no surprise. Called the hospital, and they told me that if the Little Rock school district is closed Monday, there will be no surgery. So now I sit and wait for the school district to decide if it will be open--the high tomorrow is 30° and 41° on Sunday, so I'm thinking we still won't be able to get out of our driveway. Monday the high will be 54°, and most of this will be gone. We'll see. In the meantime, go make!