Echo Quilting

[pfrost]

Ok folks. Need some help. Have my first custom job & the client is asking for echo quilting--not my forte at this point of the game--around a silhoutted elk in the very center of a wallhanging. Naturally, every little bobble will show.

I've practiced & practiced all day today & don't feel that the technique looks any better tonight than when I started practicing this morning. I've tried it freehand, as well as with the Accu-guide. (My hands ache from trying to hold the Accu-guide secure & steady.) I understand the concept of practice, but shouldn't there be some improvement after a day's worth of effort? Anyone have suggestions to make this technique easier or more successful?

Thanks for your help...tomorrow's another day.

Pat

AZ:cool:

Mille

[DawnCavanaugh]

Pat,

I wish I could come over and rub your hands with ointment!

Here are a few tips to try (do it first on your practice piece):

[*] turn off your stitch regulator, and set the machine for a medium-fast speed--if you are used to looking at your stitch length indicator for both manual and regulated mode, then set the indicator for somewhere around 13 or so.

[*] Secure your threads to begin, and clip the tails. Now turn on the machine without the regulator and start quilting a spiral, using your foot as your guide. Continue spiraling outward, aligning the edge of the foot with the line you previously quilted. Don\'t worry about a few bobbles. Concentrate on looking AHEAD of where you want to be, not where you are AT.

[*] Try spiraling both in a clockwise and counterclockwise direction. You will find that one "feels" better than the other (each of us is different--so go in the direction that feels right to you).

After doing several spirals, try drawing a few simple shapes on to your practice piece. Try a heart, triangle, leaf, square, and just a jagged shape. Spiral around these as well.

[*] If you have trouble "anticipating" where to change direction around something like a triangle, then also draw a line that extends out from each point like a ray. When you approach that line, you know to change direction.

[*] If the motor speed feels too slow or too fast, make adjustments. However, the faster you go (of course, without being "out of control") the easier it will be to make the curves flow and follow the previous lines.

[*] Traditional echo quilting becomes less "distinct" the farther out you get from the main subject, much like the ripples in water when you throw a stone into the lake. Don\'t stress too much about maintaining perfection.

I\'ll try to attach a photo of part of a Hawaiian quilt I had to do--you\'ll see lots of "wobbles" in the lines if you look carefully. To make it extra challenging, the gal wanted her lines 1/2" apart instead of 1/4 inch; so I took 1/4" masking tape and wrapped it many, many times around my hopping foot until it became 1 inch across! That gave me my 1/2" distance from the needle to the edge of the foot.

So, relax a bit, and it will come. I find that echoing with the regulator is much tougher for this particular technique. See what happens without it; worst case scenario--you get to practice another day!

Hang in there!

[DawnCavanaugh]

Here are the photos (I think!)

hawaiian quilt.doc

[Mary Beth]

Dawn,

Thanks for the directions. My echo looks pitiful, this sounds doable....I\'m gonna give it a whirl.

MB

[dtreusch]

Pat,

I read in a Diane G. book to concentrate on the space between the echos instead of the hopping foot and always, always look ahead.

I really struggled with echo quilting until I did this. Now it\'s easy and I\'ve even started doing 1/8" echo.

Debbi

[Mary Beth]

oh look at you go girl!! I just need to ppp....when? when? when?

[pfrost]

Thanks, Dawn & Debbie, for your recommendations. I\'ll give them practice today & see how it goes. If there\'s no improvement today, however, may just have to give this custom job back to the client & suggest she find someone else to do this echoing. I surely don\'t want to mess up her wallhanging. Will let ya\'ll know if these recommendations help.

Thanks again!

Pat

AZ:cool:

Mille

[sewingupastorm]

Wow Dawn your echo looks awesome!

Pat Dawn has give you execllent advice and I only have one more thing to add.......................RELAX! You just have to let it flow and keep going. Do a practice piece and try to keep a good speed maybe start fast and slow down rather than begin slow and try to be prefect. I find that if I go to slow I make way more bobbles and wobbles.

[jmyhogan]

Wow - Dawn, your echoing is amazing! I get cramps between the ears just thinking about doing something that intense. Beautiful quilting.

[Georgene]

This is probably second nature and old info to most of you, but when I tried my first echo (on my domestic sewing machine) I thought each line was a separately sewn echo. In other words, I thought you had to sew one circle (for instance) then stop. Start another circle, and stop once you met that one, and start and stop again.

It made things much easier once I discovered that you start right up against the appique, for instance, and sew continuously, around and around and around. Not stopping and starting. And no one notices that it\'s one continuous line.

Maybe there\'s at least one other person out there who is as ignorant of the process as I was, so this is for them.

I read this in Diane Guadyski\'s book.

[DawnCavanaugh]

Thanks for the kudos, gang.

Still waiting to see if Pat has "got her groove on" and is echoing up a storm!

How\'s it going, Pat?

[pfrost]

Dawn, you\'re echo quilting is outstanding; it\'ll be many years before I accomplish that level of profiency. Your "fix" to come up with 1" echoing was certainly innovative, too!

Practiced several hours yesterday & improved somewhat. Not as much as I would have liked to, but there was some improvement. Then I watched you in the APQS machine video (your APQS site,with Fons & Porter as the hostesses). I noticed that your machine seemed to glide much more easily than mine--even the 2-finger glide! Well, that\'s not the way it is here...according to a thread on this forum not too long ago, the wheels were to be adjusted so that there was a slight gap between the rail & the wheels, yet the wheels weren\'t to ride on the rail. We adjusted my wheels as closely as possible to the photo posted, & their movement certainly improved--but they never really looked exactly like those in the photo. My machine glides several inches in both directions & the control of it is better than before. However, the machine movements on that program looked sooo effortless!...curving, swerving, gliding & dipping, etc. I don\'t know if I need to work more on adjusting the wheels & loosening up their glide on the table or if that time would be better spent at more practice. Probably the latter, huh? Should I work on the wheels more & loosen them up?

Also, I noticed that the distance between your front wheels & the back wheels under the machine were spaced at a greater distance than my Mille. Could that also be a factor in the response time of the machine?

It\'s off to practice again to see if there\'s improvement today. Thanks again to all who offered suggestions. There were many with several good ideas. Appreciate any others that might be out there, too!

Have a great day to all!

Pat

AZ:cool:

Mille

[DawnCavanaugh]

Pat,

The best advice I can give about the wheels is to re-read the sections in the manual that refer to the carriage and sewing head adjustments for them. Each will refer to positions where the wheels are "as far away from the rails as possible". In theory, this extreme setting would make the machine as loosey goosey as it could be (at least in terms of wheel resistance.)

I would try loosening all four wheel cams until the machine was set for "as loose as possible" and then do some test driving. (Be sure that the cams are set the same for each machine part--for the sewing head, stand on the pantograph side of the machine and look down at the two cams on the right side of the sewing head. Loosest position is having the narrow part of the cam at "3 o\'clock". For the carriage, stand on the freehand side and look down--loosest position is 6 o\'clock.) After adjusting the cams, make sure the gold bolt on the underside of each cam is still tight.

You may find too much "slop" in the machine at that setting. Actually, you probably should feel slop at that setting. If you don\'t, it could be that your table isn\'t quite level or square, or the wheels or rails are dirty, or even that the truss bar pressure on the aluminum rails is set to high or too low, among other things.

Adjust the wheels until you are comfortable with the feel. Remember, I\'ve been quilting for 14 years, so my muscles figured out long ago how they are supposed to work together to run that machine; but it took LOTS of practice until they would actually "remember" from one quilting session to the next! So, some of the "effortless" movement you are seeing in the video could just be a reflection of more practice time, instead of a mechanical machine issue.

Keep practicing--it will get better!

[Quilting Heidi]

Dawn,

On one of my wheels the gold bolt will not tighten. I have tried turning it clockwise (righty) and counter clockwise and nothing (lefty). I couldn\'t really even see if the bolt was decending at all but I stopped because I was worried that it was going to come out. Which direction should tighten it? My machine is only two months old and I know the wheels still are not adjusted correctly. I feel a stumple when I\'m going side to side. I have double checked the table for level and it is completely level and the cylinders are the same distance apart all the way down. I have checked the truss bar and that seems right. The bolts should be at the same height on both sides, correct?

Thanks.

Heidi

[DawnCavanaugh]

Hi Heidi,

You\'ve got a couple of questions going:

As for the gold bolt, first use a 9/16" wrench on the cam above the bolt and turn it to the position that you want. Then, use a 7/16" wrench on the bottom gold bolt. Hold the cam in place, and then GENTLY turn the gold bolt to the right to tighten it. It will not take much pressure or turning to tighten it, and it will not protrude very far into the cam (when looking down from the top). You don\'t want to strip the cam threads.

Ideally, the gold bolt will adjust along with the cam when you make any changes. However, sometimes it will work its way loose after you\'ve made your adjustments. That\'s why you should check them any time you adjust the cams.

Your second question was about the trusses. They may not necessarily be at the same height, depending on the levelness of your floor and table leg adjustments. So, the easiest way to decide if they are correct is to squat down at one end of your machine, and "sight" along the top of the aluminum rails. (Move the machine to the other end out of your way.)

With your eye looking straight down the rail, you should not see a "hill" in the center or a "valley". The rail should look perfectly straight all the way to the other end. If there\'s a "hill" or crest in the rail near the middle, it means the truss bolt is applying too much pressure to the rail on that side. Bring the bolt down a bit and check again. Naturally a "valley" in the middle will mean the truss needs to apply MORE pressure to the rail to keep it straight; raise the truss bolt.

Repeat this for each of the two aluminum rails along the table. Hopefully this will get rid of your "stumple":)!

[Quilting Heidi]

Dawn,

Thanks for the feedback. I do the check on the rails tonight. Last night I did do some more checking and it seems that 2 of my wheels are leaking grease from the bearing area. The gold bolt would not tighten so it must have been stripped. I call Amy this morning and she is sending me the parts I need to fix it. Hopefully I\'ll be able to get it all running smoothly. It isn\'t horrible but it is frustrating.

Thanks again for your reply.

Heidi

[pfrost]

A couple more hints for echo quilting...

After working at this technique for the past week, I have a couple more tips to pass along. Actually, both of them were Dawn\'s ideas; one came from the little video clip mentioned earlier, but it does help:

1) Turn the handles downward so that you\'re working as close to the quilting as possible. There was an analogy for this comparing it to writing with a pencil. If one is holding the pencil by the eraser end, there is less control at the pointy end where one is trying to write. If one holds the pencil closer to the pointy end (i.e. turning the handles downward & closer to the work), then one has better control--same holds true for the handles of the Mille. I\'m short (5\'2"), so holding the handles outward or at an upward angle allows too much movement when one needs tighter movements.

2) You be in control of the machine head, rather than allow it to be in control of you. Letting the machine head move along is good, if those arm muscles are trained to manipulate all the directions/motions needed to execute the designs (and Dawn is just that good!). While trying to gain more control of the machine head, there are times I can really feel the arm muscles "learning". This is probably what Dawn means when she says her muscles "remember" from one quilting session to the next. My arm muscles are still "in training", so they need lots of practice to help them "remember" that they\'re in control & not the head of the machine. (Hope this makes sense!)

Thanks again to everyone for all the tips on echo quilting. I\'m not "there" yet, buy have had lots of good advice on learning the technique. I can see much more practice in my future!

Pat

AZ:cool:

Mille

[Hawaii]

Did a search and here is more info on the technique.

Still wondering about the base and ruler???? Does the appliguide require a base?

Thanks for all your input.

Guess I need to load up that practice piece!

[quiltmonkey]

Originally posted by Hawaii

Still wondering about the base and ruler???? Does the appliguide require a base?

Hi Barb. Thanks for finding this thread. Good info!!!

Hi. It's me again, "Little Miss Know it All" LOL!

Yes. If you are using any ruler, even the appliguide, you need the base to give you stable place to set the ruler. I would definitely SID around the edge of the applique using a ruler, whatever ruler you like.

[hollyc]

take a bit of time away, let your brain absorb what you have been trying to teach it all day. I find that as I mull it over, review it in my brain, they next time I try, somehow it is better. Let us know how it feels today.

[tsurich]

Linda Taylors crosshatch discs would work for larger than 1/4 echo spacing instead of the tape wrapping.