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Ease of loading quilt


Patricia King

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I just attended a 2 day seminar for long arm quilters. The nationally known instructor gave a suggestion to speed up the loading of the quilts. Instead of pinning the edge of the quilt and backing, staple it. Then, when you are ready to unload it, trim very close to the edge of the fabric (do NOT cut your leaders). The quilt comes right off. The staples pull out so easy!! It has speeded up my quilting time tremendously!!!:D

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Stapling the backer sounds like a great idea. You would not make any more holes in the leaders than you would if you pinned.

Trimming the backer to remove it also is do-able with enough extra fabric.

Stapling the top isn\'t for me since I always do a full float. I might be a bit concerned that the staples--which have a chisel point--would snag the fabric, but I haven\'t tried it so I will bow to the greater knowledge of your instructor!

I will try this today!

Thanks for sharing the tip--isn\'t this forum the best?

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It\'s a good tip for most of you.

The only reason why I\'d not use this tip is because it gets so gosh awful humid here in the warm months, I\'d be afraid they\'d begin to rust. the second reason is I don\'t think ,my hands would be able to handle removing them. I just baste them on by machine.. goes quicker and comes apart quicker.

RitaR.

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A while back somebody posted about stapling and I was a skeptic but decided to give it a go. It works and that is how I load now! I love that I\'m not always sticking myself too. Linda not to worry because it really doesn\'t leave any holes! I got the florist stapler from Staples and it works wonderfully. I turned around the plate so that the staples go out instead of in. If you give it a quick gentle pull it pulls right off and no tearing! If I do it on my top I do use the staple puller, the kind that just slides under the staple and they come out without any problems. I also sewed ribbon to the leaders and I can change that as it wears out.

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Heidi, a Florist stapler....is that different than a regular stapler.

I so would like to find a different way than florist pins or T-pins. Zipper sound great, but I thing they would be more of a hassle than pinning or now stapling.

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Patricia - First let me say that I full float all my quilts. I staple my quilts also. It is a time-saver. Since I full float, I do not stapel the quilt top, just the backing. There was a thread about "Turning a quilt" in which Jessica Schick explained about stapling. I went out that day and bought the stapler ($25 or less). A photo of the stapler is on the thread.

http://www.apqs.com/quiltboard/viewthread.php?tid=9959&page=1#pid89322

I pin my quilts partially, like every 6-8 inches and then backfill with staples. When done, I use a staple puller that looks a lot lke a small butter knife; it gets under the staple and pulls it out and stores the removed staples on the shaft until you dump them.

I have noticed some wear on my canvas leaders. My machine has a 6" wide canvas piece (with a zipper on one side) that gets zipped to the leader zipper so when you pin, you actually pin into the canvas piece, not a zipper. I think that I will have to replace these canvas pieces in a year or so but for now, they work great and save me lots of loading time.

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Heidi...I need to come to town and get one of those...my Staples down here doesn\'t have them, so for the mean time I got just a simple one and will use that till then. Thanks again for the pictures....CRS set in and I for the life of me didn\'t know what a florist stapler was. :P

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I just bought a hand held stapler at Office Max. It\'s not that fancy florist stapler, kind of looks like a normal stapler only you hold it in your hand to use it. I was afraid to try it, but today I jumped in with both feet! I stapled the backing fabric to the zippers, was done in a flash. Then I pinned the top. Soon and very soon I will be using my new, antique Willcox and Gibbs and using a chain stitch for the quilt top. I am planning to attach something to my zipper like canvas or twill tape or something, to save the life of my zippers.

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