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The leaves have been gorgeous this fall. I'm hoping to get out for a nice walk later today to enjoy the beauty. Of course my favorite leaves are those in a quilt. The following sampler quilt top has a wonderful fall theme and was provided by Beth R - who indicated that she wanted "medium custom". For this week's post, I want to walk through how I decided to quilt it. Even if not doing a leaf quilt, this can assist you in analyzing your own quilts.  The theme for this quilt definitely needed to be "leaves". There are a number of different spaces that need to be filled and I also needed to address how I wanted to quilt each of the sampler blocks.  I started by going back to my library of quilting books for inspiration. In looking at "Machine Freehand Patterns" by Nan Moore, I discovered a few pages of freehand leaf designs. The beauty with using my Art and Stitch software is that I only have to draw "one" leaf and then I can modify for designs I can use on my Intelliquilter. If you don't have a computerized system, these designs could also be done freehand. Here is what I came up with for spaces 1, 3 and 4. A wreath (or partial wreath) of oak leaves.
For a free quilting pattern this week, I decided to give you the oak leaf wreath. Click here for a pdf of the pattern. Click here for the Art and Stitch file. For space five I decided to go with another leaf variation. This one could be used as a point to point design as well. I like that I can stretch this (or shorten this) to fill a space.  Leaf quilting for Sashing or Skinny Border For the sashing I wanted a very simple leaf with vine that could come together in the corner.  Leaf Quilting for Sahsing or Skinny Borders For the border, I will use a design that came with my Intelliquilter, Falling Leaves by Dave Hudson.  Now for the sampler blocks. There were a number that were based on an eight pointed star, so I came up with a leaf that could be flipped and rotated to fill the space. For the backgrounds, I will use a point to point arc and do that directly on my longarm.
There were a couple of additional blocks that I designed some other quilt patterns around a leaf. The second design was inspired by the "Leaf Flower" in Patterns by Helen on my Intelliquilter.
For the leaf blocks, I wanted some leaf like texture or veins. The "S Curve" option was inspired from a book by Deloa Jones. All of these blocks will also have "arcs" in the background spaces.
I hope this provides some inspiration when quilting your next leaf quilt. Here are some photos of the finished quilt. I used a rust thread for much of the quilt -- which of course means the quilting is only visible on the back. But you can see more of the quilting in the close-ups. 
Happy quilting. Kari Sign up for my newsletter to stay current on what's happening in my studio and learn more quilting tips. As a thank you, I'll send you a FREE pattern for this small maple leaf quilt.
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Last spring I had the opportunity to get to know Bunnie Cleland. Bunnie is a new quilt designer and had just released a series of patterns which utilize the 60 degree equilateral triangle. Her patterns (which at the time had just been picked up by Checker Distributions) are now on their best seller list. They may also be purchased here. I've been keeping my eye out for appropriate fabric and found the following Jo Morton border print which I thought I would try.  After spending some time analyzing the fabric, I couldn't decide if the fabric would actually work. And then of course the decision would be where to actually cut the strips. So I made another trip to the quilt store. This time electing a safer border fabric (i.e. one with blurrier lines). I purchased two yards of the fabric, not sure exactly how much I would need. (My apologies for the blurry photo. The was taken with my iphone at a quilt retreat right before I cut up the fabric.)  Gentle Flowers by Quilt Gate I was pleased to find that two yards went a very long way! From that I made the five quilts including the "Hexagon Table Topper", two of the "Triangle Frenzy Runner" and two of the "Triangle Frenzy Swirl". Quilting Triangle Frenzy Quilts For the Hexagon Table Topper, I decided to quilt this with a simple triangle design. Using Art and Stitch I started by drafting a basic triangle design that would fit in one of the 60 degree triangle pieces. I then created a wreath using Magic Circle. From that I deleted two of the triangles.
For the Triangle Frenzy Swirls, I first used another simple design rotated with Magic Circle.
 Finished Triangle Frenzy Swirls by Kari Schell For the second swirls, I used a pattern from Sue Heinz "Drawn to Mastery" book. Her book is focused on free-handing the deigns, but I have found they are fun to work with in Art and Stitch. I just drafted one of the design elements and then had fun playing with it.
 Finished Triangle Frenzy Swirls by Kari Schell For the Triangle Frenzy Runner, I used another design by Sue Heniz.   Finished Triangle Frenzy Runner by Kari Schell For the other runner I used a floral design that I had developed.
 Finished Triangle Frenzy Runner by Kari Schell Would you like to try using my quilting designs? I've included pdfs of the three motifs I developed. Click on the photo for the link to the pdf.
For those that use Art and Stitch, I am also offering a FREE Art and Stitch file for the floral design. Stay tuned. Next week I will share how I solved my dilemma with the Jo Morton border. Happy quilting. Kari Sign up for my newsletter to stay current on what's happening in my studio and learn more quilting tips. As a thank you, I'll send you a FREE pattern for this small maple leaf quilt.
Welcome. This week I am excited to share two videos with you. There was so much to share that I decided to split the video into two parts. Here is the finished project.  I want to do a special call-out to Anne Hurlburt. She is a certified Art and Stitch instructor and did her Addendum on doing Applique on her longarm. She has a ton of good information particularly for those using a Statler. My approach was a bit different than Anne's, but is built on her technique. I started with a design in Electric Quilt, transferred it to Art and Stitch (where I created my new master). From Art and Stitch I created the stitching for my longarm. I also took the shapes and cut them using my Silhouette Cameo. All of this is described in Part 1 of the Video. if you aren't using a Silhouette cutting machine, you can ignore the last section of Part 1. Just print out the patterns in Art and Stitch and trace them on your fusible interfacing. Postcript on 9/29/2014 - Loes Vanderheijden shared an even better way to transfer from EQ to Art and Stitch. Here are her instructions. In Electric Quilt (I used EQ7): ====================== 1. Open the desired block or stencil in your sketchbook and click on Edit to place it on the EQ Workspace. 2. Look at the rulers and make a note of the block dimensions. 3. Choose menu File > Export Metafile of Block 4. In the next dialog click on the button "Copy to Windows Clipboard". In Art and Stitch (version 3): ==================== 5. Start a new Design Page and choose menu Edit > Paste Special. This will place a copy of the EQ design on the Art and Stitch Design Page, as artwork. 6. While it's still selected, go to Properties panel, tab Transform and enter the dimensions you wrote down in step 2. Click on Apply. 7. To reduce the too many nodes, select all, right-click and choose Simplify Smoothen. Use the following settings: Curve Precision (%): 30 Angle Tolerance: 57 Distance tolerance: 20. Part 2 of the video shows the actual application and stitch out on my APQS Millennium with Intelliquilter. Regardless of your computerized system, I think you will find this useful. Part 2 was done using a small video camera and is a little choppy. I did some major editing to shorten the video which is much more noticeable when using a camera. Once I finished my piece, I added an "envelope" back and created a full fall pillow. I used lots of leftover batting pieces for stuffing the pillow form. Footnote: I heard from a couple of people that are using the Brother Scan-and-Cut system. Silhouette has also recently come out with PixScan technology. If you wanted to avoid tracing the jpeg Art and Stitch file, you could actually print out the filled shapes from Art and Stitch and scan directly into your system of choice. (I just received my PixScan mat this afternoon and was very impressed with the accuracy of the scan of my printed Art and Stitch file.) Happy quilting. Kari Sign up for my newsletter to stay current on what's happening in my studio and learn more quilting tips. As a thank you, I'll send you a FREE pattern for this small maple leaf quilt.
Have you been contemplating how you would quilt my Irish Eyes top? For those that were working in Electric Quilt or Art and Stitch, I hope my mini-tutorials from last week were helpful.  Irish Eyes Quilt top by Kari Schell - Inspired by a Quilt by Irma Gail Hatcher. Let me share how I approached coming up with quilting designs for this top. I worked in Art and Stitch for my quilting solution. The quilt has a fair number of "open spaces". So I decided to go with custom. I identified the potential quilting zones in the quilt.  Irish Eyes quilt top by Kari Schell. Inspired from quilt by Irma Gail Hatcher. I then came up with a quilting design to fill one of the unique spaces. I knew I wanted some curves in the quilting and frankly I just doodled a bit until I found something I liked.  The other elements were pretty much based on this particular element. For the center circle, I created a magic circle.  I connected the images. I needed to add one more line to connect the final image back to the beginning image.  Then I added smooth nodes at the center of all the connecting line segment. I also put a couple of placement circles in the center of the block. Then I dragged the smooth nodes to one of the circles.   For the half circles, I took a section of the wreath block.  I created a smaller less complex wreath for the smaller blocks in the border.  I just used the top of the original element for the square within a square unit and the half blocks in the border.
The corner was a little wonky, so I played with a number of these elements to fill the space.  The overall look is as follows:  Borders were filled as follows:  Overall, I am pleased with the results. I just now need to find some time to get the quilt on the machine to get it finished. Free Quilting Design Would you like to play with my primary motif. I've included a pdf of the image along with the Art and Stitch file.  Time to Party Did you come up with some ideas on how you would quilt this? Maybe a pantograph or edge to edge design? Or some other favorite designs from your collection? If you blogged about it, I am hoping you would be willing to share your blog here. If not blogging, come back later in the week to see the other blogger's posts. Here are the guidelines: New Easter Quilt Idea I was playing in Electric Quilt this week and decided this would make a nice Easter quilt. Stay tuned for more about this quilt.  Happy Quilting. Kari Sign up for my newsletter to stay current on what's happening in my studio and learn more quilting tips. As a thank you, I'll send you a FREE pattern for this small maple leaf quilt.
The top is done. Now on to what often is considered the biggest challenge in finishing your quilt – how to quilt it. One of my favorite parts of a longarm group I was a part of was the show and tell. Members were encouraged to bring quilt tops they were struggling with. The group would typically throw out a number of ideas on how they would quilt the top – often feeding on suggestions from the other machine quilters. I want to bring this concept to the internet. My plan is to post a photo of an unfinished quilt top. You will be encouraged to blog about how you would quilt the top. Others can read your post and you can read theirs. Here is the quilt:  Irish Eyes Quilt Top by Kari Schell - Inspired by a quilt by Irma Gail Hatcher About the quilt This quilt has been sitting in my unfinished top pile for at least a decade. The name of the quilt is Irish Eyes. I think I saw the quilt in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. I'm not even sure if instructions were provided. The quilt that inspired this was made by Irma Gail Hatcher. It was part of the 40 finalists in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine's Contest: Discovery - A New World in Quilting. It won a Judge's Award, and appeared on the cover of The Quilter, a magazine published in London, England. It was selected as Fairfield's Batting Christmas quilt and appeared in their ads in October, November, and December, 1992. Blog Party Guidelines 1. Create a blog post between April 12-18 focused on how you would quilt this top. You can use any media you want to draw out your planned solution. Art and Stitch, Electric Quilt or any basic drawing program would work. Or just print out a photo of the quilt and draw your solution by hand. Take a photo of your results and upload it to your blog. 2. On April 12th, I will set up the party on my blog. Post a link to your blog post through the inlinkz button on that blog. Include a link back to the party (i.e. the April 12th post) in your blog. 4. Review and comment on at least two other participant’s blog posts. 5. Agree to be notified about subsequent link-ups. (I will add you to a mail list to keep you informed about these link-ups.) Suggestions if Using Art and Stitch Copy the photo of the quilt top. Within Art and Stitch, select Paste Backdrop. This is in the "Edit" section. Select where you would like to save the image. FYI - I believe Paste Backdrop is a new feature in Version 3. It makes savings backdrops even easier as you can do it on the fly as developing a project.
Select the backdrop and change the width to 47 inches. This will give you an approximate quilt size to work with.  You can now draw your quilting option directly on the quilt image. I did find it easier to lighten the backdrop a bit. I also changed the pen size to 2.0 so that it stands out a bit. Suggestions If Using Electric Quilt Save the image on your computer. Within EQ, go to the "Work on Image" tab. Import this image.  Resize the image to 10" wide. I did try to resize the photo to to 38 x 38 (the maximum block size). However it made the image way too large and it no longer worked within the program. So I decided to work with a smaller size for the block and the quilt..  Save to Sketchbook. In the Sketchbook photo tab, copy the image to fabrics.  In the "Work on Quilt" tab, set up a new quilt using the Horizontal Layout. Set the number of blocks to 1 horizontal and 1 vertical. Set the size of the block to 10 inches. Delete the border.  In Layer 1, color your block with the new fabric you just created. Now you can add quilting motifs via layer 2. You can create your own or you could add motifs from the library. You could also import the image on the "Work on Block" tab. Crop a section of the quilt image to work with a smaller area at a time.  I'm hoping this quilt is inspiring you to create some designs of your own, or use some of your existing designs and stencils. I would love to see what you develop and look forward to your linking your blogs to next Saturday's post. I will be working on my own design ideas this week. If you aren't blogging, come back to see all the ideas quilters have developed. Happy Quilting. Kari Sign up for my newsletter to stay current on what's happening in my studio and learn more quilting tips. As a thank you, I'll send you a FREE pattern for this small maple leaf quilt.
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