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Can I use an edge to edge design in the background behind an applique?

Marg Layton

By Marg Layton
in Compu-Quilter

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Marg Layton Advanced Member

Marg Layton

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I have just received a Sock Monkey quilt where the sock monkey is appliqued to a plain background almost like a medallion, but there is lots of blank area behind him. I would like to use a Monkey Business border to border design from the Anne Bright website in this blank area. The customer wants me to outline the applique, and then fill in the background, and I thought this Monkey Business design would look really cute because it has cute little monkeys with curly tails and smiley faces, and some bananas as well. I have been told it is

available in CQ format.

After outlining the applique freehand, do I just do a pattern start, pattern end for the blank space beside/behind the monkey? Do I try to do a boundary? The background area is about 24 inches square, and the monkey applique is roughly 10 inches wide by 17 inches long, but it is placed on a diagonal. Because my machine has a y limit of 17.5 inches, I can't do the whole thing at once. I do not have any experience with doing an outline.

Is there anyone out there who can help me with this?

Marg Layton

APQS Millie with CQ

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Deb2bie Advanced Member

Deb2bie

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I've done this with pantos with the laser light. First I mark the panto on the table where I stop and start. Then stitch up to the edge, stop, cut threads, move to other side of space and start stitching again. I don't have CQ or any other computerized machine but think you could do this by telling the machine where to stop, just like it was the edge of the quilt.

JMHO,

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smorris Advanced Member

smorris

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Hi

The way I would do it is:

Tell CQ you are doing a quilt that is 23.75" x 23.75 (to allow for shrinkage or wonky seams)

Then set it for 2 row repeats

Choose a design that is not too dense or the stops and starts at the applique will drive you nuts.

Start CQ at the top left corner, and start it stitching

When it gets as close as you dare to the applique button - hit the abort - secure your stitches

Then go through the steps as if you were going to Restart (ie go to Restart page)

Jog following the line of the pattern over the applique until it goes back to the background,

Secure your stitches and start stitching.

Keep doing this until you've passed the applique

At the end of the row, just do what you normally do to get back to the top left corner

Index down, roll on and repeat for the second row.

Time consuming but it works.

Good luck

Sue in Australia

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Marg Layton Advanced Member

Marg Layton

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I will try. I have never posted a picture to this site and don't even know how to get them off my camera to do so, but I will see if I can get one of my knowledgeable children to help me. Of course, I need to try this first. So please don't hold your breath, because I have no idea how long it will take me. I just know it needs to be done in time for Christmas, as do about 6 other quilts I have right now.

I really do appreciate your help. I have often wished I had a mentor to help me learn this new craft, and I feel like you have reached out from the other side of the Pacific to help me. Thanks.

Marg from western Canada

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digisuz Advanced Member

digisuz

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Computerized Designs Placed Around or Within A Shape

Hi Marg and Tina,

I thought it was important to add some information about the art of computerized quilting to understand the consequences of the approach Sue is describing here. When a hand-guided LA quilter quilts around an appliqué they can control where they start and stop or continue their stitch path around the appliqué with precision because they’re quilting the background design on the fly. Computerizing this capability opens a world of possibilities to place a huge selection of designs around or within an appliqué or any other shape, but it also presents additional challenges.

When zones are cut from pre-digitized designs, the continuous sew path is disrupted. It’s turned into multiple motif designs that depending on the shape of the appliqué can be really broken up. Any computerized quilting system or program that attempts to offer a feature which edits a design to fit either around or within another design will be faced with the same issues: 1. Do they try to reduce the number of knots and jumps by having the computer add connection stitches between breaks in the design . . . . and, if so, will the quilter be happy with the esthetics 2. As the machine comes to the edge of a shape like an appliqué, how is it best to handle stops to reduce or eliminate lots of ugly knots. Imagine stitching out an edge-to edge pantograph or background fill pattern, and then imagine taking scissors and cutting a hole in the center of your quilting. Look at what happens to the pattern . . it has new areas of starts and stops and incomplete design elements all around the hole. In computerized quilting language, you would have multiple incomplete open-ended motifs. The more the pattern you want to use around the appliqué moves in 360 degree directions, the more what I’m saying will be true as there will be design elements that would have traveled into and back out of the “hole” in the pattern. The challenge is how a computerized system addresses these issues so the quilting will have the look of hand-guided control.

While such a feature is advanced and sounds very exciting, my opinion is the results are not yet ideal. They just don’t always look very pretty and it’s questionable that they would pass the test of discerning quilters much less a judge in competition. I’m not putting them down; I’m stating the obvious that pre-determining where stitches will end up is difficult due to variables like draw-in, batting thickness and accuracy of piecing. Just because a feature is available it doesn’t mean that you’ll be happy with how the quilting looks. The genius of computerized quilting is how to program features that accommodate the variables and allow the quilting system to perform in any situation. Where computerized quilting seems to be going to offer creative “no sew” zones is to have the machine make tiny stitches before a stop instead of knotting off and to attempt to follow the edge of a shape with stitches that connect motifs that have been “cut away’ from the continuous sew path. Time will tell if we will be satisfied with the results.

Marg, CompuQuilter does not yet have the feature you want and need to complete your project, so the method Sue recommends will likely yield incomplete results that you’ll have to address in another way. If you just try to come close to the edge of an appliqué, turn off the machine, jump to the opposite side of the appliqué and re-start, a high percentage of the time you’ll be eliminating design elements that belong on one side or the other of the appliqué but won’t be there because those elements were separated from the digitized continuous stitch path. Either you could go back to open areas around the appliqué and fill them in with hand-guided quilting, or you could edit the designs in a program like AutoSketch. Unless you can hand-guide virtually any design element missing from a pattern, you may want to edit the digital design instead, and then save a custom pass for your project. The added benefit would be that you could control where you wanted the pattern to jump from one side of the appliqué to the other as well as the appearance and placement of the connection stitches. I believe this gives a better result.

You can use Pro-QD or AutoSketch to create a custom path around appliqué. You’ll have to decide if you want to spend the extra money on Pro-QD since AutoSketch already comes with CQ. You might want to keep in mind that program updates for CompuQuilter are free and Stan’s work on enhancements is ongoing. With the new features of CQ.4 and expanded capabilities of the conversion program built right into CQ, you don’t need Pro-QD for features like cropping designs, staggering patterns in 1% increments, using custom start points, creating stitchable outline files for patterns within patterns, or converting dxf and Statler qli files to run on CQ. CompuQuilter will very likely add features to produce no sew zones, as many of the computerized systems tend to offer similar capabilities, some sooner than others.

Suzanne Moreno, Digitizing Instructor, Designer

AutoSketch Book and Lessons

Look for articles about Computerized Quilters in Unlimited Possibilities Magazine

www.designstoquilt.com

cqdigi@charter.net

541.660.8053

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smorris Advanced Member

smorris

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Hi Suzanne

Thank you for posting your thoughts on using the Restart feature of CQ as a means of quilting behind an applique and your opinion about the quality of work done on computerised systems with a "cut-out" feature.

Marg's question asked how she would quilt behind an applique using the current version of Compuquilter - my suggestion was to use the Restart feature. In your post you said that using this method would:

..." be eliminating design elements that belong on one side or the other of the appliqué but won’t be there because those elements were separated from the digitized continuous stitch path. Either you could go back to open areas around the appliqué and fill them in with hand-guided quilting, or you could edit the designs in a program like AutoSketch. Unless you can hand-guide virtually any design element missing from a pattern, you may want to edit the digital design instead, and then save a custom pass for your project. The added benefit would be that you could control where you wanted the pattern to jump from one side of the appliqué to the other as well as the appearance and placement of the connection stitches.

I don't find this to be accurate because:

On the Restart page you can see the stitching pattern and the editing points, when you come to the edge of the applique you simply hit the red button, if you are one or even two stitches short, just hit the one stitch button to get closer to the applique edge.

Draw-in is not an issue when using Restart as you are selecting the stops and starts as you go.

If you feel that the stops and starts look obvious (I don't), you have the choice of choosing no anchor stitches and pulling up a length of thread to be woven in later

There should be no need to freehand anything, just follow the stitching path on the screen and stop and start stitching where necessary as you would if you had broken thread - accuracy and flexibility of the Restart feature, which I believe is underused, is one of the strongest features of CQ. This is time-consuming but (in my opinion) no more than creating a pass in Pro-Q or Autosketch with which draw-in could be a problem.

Regarding your comments about the systems currently on the market which have the "cut-out" feature:

It is true that "draw-in" will affect how precisely you can place your quilting depending on the size of the area to be "cut-out", the area to be quilted , batting etc, - this most likely will be the case with ANY computerised quilting system available now and in the future and it is also a consideration when drawing your design with Autosketch. To get around this, with CQ, use the One Stitch feature to place extra stitches and trace the design over the quilt before stitching.

While at Houston, I was able to watch a demonstration of Statler's "cut-out" feature and I didn't notice any knots or ugly stops and starts as you said, I believe there was also the option of not tying off, just dragging the threads to be woven in afterwards which would suit Show quilts.

APQS' Quilt Studio will have a Boundary in a Boundary feature which will automatically do this type of work too - it uses Microsoft Visio for drawing and editing of designs inside, and separately from, Quilt Studio and is very easy to use as it has many of the features we are already familiar with. IQ also has a cut-out feature which its users seem to like.

Best wishes

Sue in Australia

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Marg Layton Advanced Member

Marg Layton

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Dear Sue:

I tried your suggestion of using the restart feature, and it worked quite well. I did not go with the monkey design my customer liked, because I thought it looked too busy behind the Sock Monkey applique. Instead, I chose a more textured type of design that was quite open with no cross over stitches, and it looked just fine. Yes, it did take a lot longer to do, and yes, I did not use any anchor stitches, but pulled up the bobbin thread and wove it into the batting along with the top thread. I did a trial run with the switch on off so I could tell when I needed to hit the abort button and was able to advance the machine along the stitch path to where I wanted to begin again. I also did a freehand outline around the applique itself, and my customer was quite happy.

Because I am not that adept with Autosketch yet and didn't know how to do some of the technical things that Suzanne was talking about, I believe this worked out okay for me.

Thank you for your help.

Marg

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Sue E. Advanced Member

Sue E.

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Originally posted by Marg Layton

I don't know how to post a picture. I have the floppy disk from my camera but don't know how to put it here. Can anyone help?

Marg, what I would do is load the picture onto your hard drive. I use a free program called PhotoRazor (www.stormdance.net) to shrink the picture - this is a simple program to use. Once the photo is shrunk (I usually leave the setting as is or shrink slightly more), I then look at the bottom of the "reply" screen for where it says "Attachment:" Browse to the directory where the photo is saved and select it. Once it is selected, post reply. Hopefully your photo will be there.

Good luck. If this doesn't work, do a search in the archives. Linda in Ramona has posted detailed directions on how to post photos.

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digisuz Advanced Member

digisuz

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Hello,

I’m so happy you got this project done, Marg . . nice job. What’s important is that you got it done and you probably learned a lot in the process. I know that it’s from the challenges that I have learned the most. From my heart, I offered to help you because I know your AutoSketch knowledge is not yet complete.

Sue (Aussie Sue), I don’t want to argue with you because I really respect you. I feel that you may have jumped to a conclusion about what I was saying.

Apparently what you saw Statler doing with their “cut out” feature in Houston is what I said they were working on after MQS in May. At MQS they were talking about programming the machine to make tiny stitches as it came up to the edge of the appliqué, instead of knotting off, and they wanted to have stitches that connected breaks in design elements to track along the edge of the appliqué/shape as much as possible. One of their main programmers told me it was Linda Taylor who pointed out that the way the machine was coming up to the appliqué and knotting off would not fly for competition. I guess they finished updating that feature. Yes we can turn off anchor stitches, but I think Statler wanted to address this issue in an automated way as well because of Linda’s feedback and future designs with additional capabilities. My previous post talked about what some of the other computerized systems were thinking about doing with these concerns.

IQ is testing “no sew zone” features that go beyond what they are already doing and they too were looking to address this issue of how to enhance the esthetics of areas that are cut from inside or outside a shape. I haven’t heard how this is going but you're right they have many happy customers. At MQS and again recently Dee Dee mentioned that they have also been thinking of these issues for CQ. I would imagine that Quilt Studio will address these challenges too.

It is possible for a quilting design digitized or edited in AutoSketch to have advantages because of the ability to add custom start points and no sew lines to the stitch file. With these capabilities designs can be edited (including multiple breaks to fit around an appliqué) while also maintaining attributes that allow you to use CQ’s features, like pattern start and pattern end. This is the kind of stuff I was thinking of when I said I would prefer to do this task with custom files created in AutoSketch. For the quality of the result, it’s not too time consuming either. There are several ways of using AutoSketch to capitalize on CQ’s ability to read custom start points and no sew lines to positively effect results on the quilt. Once you know some AutoSketch basics, these are simple and easy to learn.

The computerized systems are trying to offer a diversity of “no sew zone” options in such a way that it isn’t time consuming. The way you can do it with CQ now is quite time consuming. CQ doesn’t have the feature yet because of the issues I’ve stated here . . . because they want it to be better.

Marg is a new CQ user so I was just trying to give her a heads up by pointing out that she might want to think through the method you described, Sue. When you quoted me, you left out the beginning of the sentence where I said how it was possible to miss elements belonging to one side or the other of the appliqué. Depending on her experience with re-starts and design choice there would be multiple areas of incomplete open-ended motifs that would have to be addressed in so far as the stitch path went into and back out of the area where the appliqué was. If she didn’t realize that, she would end up with incomplete areas. I was just trying to add to the help.

I’m well aware that we can turn off anchor stitches, hand tie and bury threads and knots, use a single stitch option and abort, re-start, abort, re-start endlessly to do the job Marg has done. When/if CQ offers additional options to create designs inside and outside of designs, it may likely be programmed in a way similar to the systems that have this feature now. They identify the perimeter of the shape they want to place designs inside or outside of. A “custom” pass or design is then created within the computerized system. You’ll either like the look or not if there are programmed stops and connection stitches attempting to follow the edge of the shape. The variables of draw in, thickness of batting and accuracy of piecing could have an effect on the net result. The way Marg did this task might be accurate . . . but perhaps not at all time efficient for those of us who quilt for a living. It could be possible to do it another way that’s accurate and faster. I’m an advocate of learning digitizing and editing as it increases your possibilities and capabilities and allows you to go beyond built-in features.

It’s likely that different quilters with different levels of experience would respond to this situation in a variety of ways. My passion is computerized quilting, beginning to advance digitizing and designing. I can only offer my perspective from my experience and knowledge niche. There are some quilters who would not want to take the time Marg needed to complete this task in the way she did it. Others don’t want to learn digitizing skills. And, there are probably quilters who think they’ll never use a computerized system.

I am a huge fan of computerized quilting and digitizing; always excited about advanced features. I don’t know if I’m saying this right, but I hope most of you think it’s OK to discuss the consequences and level of precision and practicality when using some features and programs. Advancements are being made all the time and I’m certain we will continue to see amazing things from our computerized quilting systems. My deepest appreciation goes to the inventors of these systems and the experiences of the quilters using them.

Warm Regards to Everyone,

Suzanne Moreno, Digitizing Instructor, Designer

AutoSketch Book and Lessons

www.designstoquilt.com

541.660.8053

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