HOW TO BUILD A LONGARM AND A SPACESHIP 🚀

I haven't quilted in forever and in the past I have always quilted by hand which takes foreeeeeeever!  Last year I started to quilt again and I decided to do it on my 45 year old Elna sewing machine. I bought my machine when I was 16 years old and, yes, if you do the math that makes me 61. I finished three small quilts this way, but quite honestly, it was very frustrating to quilt them on my old machine.

Forty-five years old and still stitching perfectly.
I'm lusting after a new BERNINA though!

I started by making a quilt to match the whimsical bird dresser that my husband had given me when I turned 60. Then I did a Christmas quilt for my sister and a napping quilt for the youngest of the boys that I take care of and then finally a table runner for my dining room.

I love the dresser my husband gave me.  It has
cutouts of birds with paper panels behind them.

The Napping Quilt

My Table runner

My sister's quilt

Then I pieced together a queen sized quilt for my nephew's wedding only to have one of those moments of perfect clarity where I realized there was no way in heck that I could quilt a quilt that big on my old machine.  So, off I went to my local quilt shop and took a certification course on their longarm.  Doing this would allow me to rent time on it and finish my quilt for my nephew and his fianceé.  Yes, I know I could have taken it to a longarmer to finish for me but I didn't want to give the happy couple a gift from me and "some other lady they didn't know".  I wanted this quilt to be entirely from me, mistakes and all.  What I didn't know at the time is that this one small trip to my quilt shop would lead me to many new adventures in my life.

Quilting my nephew's wedding quilt 
on the longarm at the quilt shop.

Woo! Hoo! I bought a Longarm! Oh No! I bought a Longarm! Those two thoughts took turns banging back and forth endlessly through my head for a whole entire month while I waited for my longarm to arrive. I would literally wake up in the middle of the night in either complete joy or complete panic or a mix of joyful panic. Finally they delivered my longarm! Now a longarm is huge and even disassembled it arrives in huge boxes and no amount of tipping, bribing or cajoling would get the truck drivers to carry those boxes upstairs for us. That left the heavy lifting to me and my husband and I'm not even going to tell you how many times he dropped that heavy sewhead box on my toes going up the stairs.  I was just happy to finally get it up there. We had the two little boys that I watch staying with us for part of the summer and, apparently, when you put LITTLE BOYS together with BIG BOXES you get a SPACESHIP 🚀 🚀 🚀

❤️❤️❤️

With the boys staying with us I didn't get a chance to use my new longarm but we did get to name it ... Lola ❤️  It was sort of like getting a big, shiny new Christmas present but not being able to open it up and play with it.  I didn't mind though because I was happy to have my little boys with me. During this time I got an email from the BERNINA Creative Center telling me that there had been a cancellation in their Get To Know Your Q Series class and asking me if I wanted to go. I immediately emailed back, "Yes, Yes and Yes!"  I arrived there with only three hours of experience under my belt, well more if you count that first day I tried to get the fabric pinned onto the zippered leaders and then proceeded to sew right across the leaders and then spent an hour picking that out. I was so nervous to attend the class.  First, I had never sewn on a Bernina computerized sewing machine and I knew we would be constructing a quilt top to later quilt on the longarm. And, second, I kinda figured I'd be the newbie in the class, which I was.

Denise Jones, myself and Nina McVeigh at the
BERNINA Get to Know Your Q Series Class.

Free Motion Quilting - My Leaves

It turns out that The BERNINA Creative Center, which is located in Aurora, Illinois, is an hour away from the town I grew up in.  We drove there from North Carolina and while I went to class my husband hung out with my family so a good time was had by all.  Actually,  I had more than a good time, I had a wonderful time!  Our instructors were Denise Jones and Nina McVeigh and they were patient and knowledgable and had a wicked keen sense of humor which made the class a delight to take.  We also got to meet Hans Herzog and he spent time talking to us about the technical side of the machine. Hans has the nicest Swiss accent, ja? I could have listened to him all afternoon. Oh, and we ate and ate and then we ate some more! Brownies and cheesecake and cookies, oh my! When we got home to North Carolina I would get a little grumpy in the afternoons because I hadn't met my "BERNINA cheesecake quota" for the day.  Ten pounds later I had to give that little quota up! Cheesecake aside, the class was amazing!  I learned SO much from Denise and Nina about the longarm. I also picked up all sorts of tips and tricks from my fellow classmates during our breaks, some of whom have been longarming for years.  Besides the basics of the longarm itself, Denise and Nina taught us all about needles and thread and thread tension and then showed us how to stitch with a twin needle, how to bind, how to couch and how to stipple using the BERNINA Precision Palm Handles. And, thanks to Nina, I learned how to thread the needle threader on the longarm each and every time!  The very best part was that I came home feeling empowered!  Lola doesn't intimidate me at all anymore.  I can do anything and everything that I put my mind to doing.  And, now, each time I make a mistake I just mark it down as a learning experience and just keep on quilting joyfully along!

LOLA is in the house ❣️

I invite you to follow me on my new longarm journey by following my new blog.  I would enjoy reading your comments.  I hope you use your longarm to quilt some joy into your world today!

HOW MY QUILTING JOURNEY STARTED ❤️

As a little girl, I grew up surrounded by quilts that were made for us by my grandmother.  They kept me toasty warm in the winter and yet nice and cool in the summer.  The secret to that magic was in all those loving stitches and, I suspect, the breathable cotton flannel layered inside.  A quilt is a work of art and a labor of love and if you're lucky enough to possess an old scrap quilt it's also a remarkable piece of history stitched together by thread.

One of my most treasured memories as a young girl is sitting at my grandma’s kitchen table surrounded by all sorts of colorful scraps of fabrics while she and my mom and my aunts decided which fabrics looked best when placed next to one another.  The end result was always a gorgeous array of fabrics stitched into a quilt that told a story, a story that I could tell myself when I was snuggled beneath the quilt looking at each and every patch. There would be material from my grandma’s kitchen curtains, her aprons, her Sunday dress, the short set she made me one summer and countless pieces of our lives all stitched together in beautiful colors and patterns. To this day I can still remember where all those scraps of fabric came from and still feel all the love stitched into those quilts.

A photo of my grandma's quilt square on 
a mousepad.

The first quilt that my grandmother gave me I used on my bed until I was married and by that time it was in tatters and I’m talking serious tatters, long strips that would wrap around me as I tossed and turned in my sleep.  I just wasn’t willing to pack it away because, much like a worn childhood teddy bear, I cherished it. Then one morning my husband woke up to find the quilt wrapped around my neck and he put his foot down and I had to tuck my quilt away. I still have it, tatters and all. My grandmother has long since passed away, yet the memory of her remains in each of the quilts that she made for us, her love still firmly stitched into each and every one.  

My armoire filled with my grandmother's
quilts and a few of my own.

When I got married, my husband brought with him an heirloom quilt that had been passed down through his family and was quite striking in its beauty.  Our living room had twenty foot cathedral ceilings so I decided to hand this huge heirloom quilt as a work of art on the wall.  Through its many years of use, however, the batting in this vintage quilt had stretched completely out of shape so that one corner hung much longer than the other.  In order to hang it on the wall I had to stand on a tall ladder and patiently hammer in hundreds of stick pins to gently lift the one side up so that it would hang straight across the bottom.  Over the years as we would repaint I would have to take that quilt down and then painstakingly pin it all back up into place again.  It hung there for thirty years so you can imagine the damage the sun did to it since it was hanging next to a wall of glass.  And, yes, I know you're not supposed to treat heirloom quilts that way, instead you should do your best to preserve and protect them, but for thirty years we enjoyed that work of beauty on our wall before moving away and taking it down for good.  I think it was well worth it!

A photo of my husband's heirloom quilt on a mug.  

When I was pregnant with my son, I purchased a quilt from a lady who owned a quilt shop in Miami Beach.  I wanted to hang it on the wall over his crib in the nursery.  She was in the process of teaching this quilt as a class at her shop and so she only had the pieced top finished. She called it "The Sleeping Bear Quilt". She took it with her wherever she went in order to work on the hand quilting so that it would be done in time for my son's birth.  My son had his own plans, however, and arrived four months early.  He weighted only one pound, ten ounces. He spent the next four months in the NICU and when he came home his quilt was up on the wall waiting for him❣️

"The Sleeping Bear" quilt made for my son.

When my son was in pre-school I received my very first catalog in the mail from Keepsake Quilting and I absolutely fell in love.  I must have thumbed through those pages hundreds of times.  It brought back so many loving memories of watching my grandma make her quilts that I was filled with a desire to learn how to quilt myself so that I could make a quilt of my very own.  I ordered a “how to quilt” book and a quilt kit that included a “Lotus Blossom” pattern and all the material to make it. Then every day as I sat in the car line at my son’s school I would stitch together all the pieces by hand. Then I quilted it by hand.  It took me over a year to finish it.  That was my first quilt and I was very proud of it.  I made a few more quilts by hand but then life just sort of got in the way and I never quilted again until recently.

My first quilt made entirely by hand.

I hope some day that my family will cherish my quilts as much as I love and cherish my grandmother's.  Sometimes I think that sewing has become a lost art.  It's no longer a requirement to learn how to cook and sew in school and our favorite hobbies these days usually involve technology and anything with immediate gratification.  Parents don't always stop to teach their children the joy that comes as a reward from patiently working on a craft.  I know my world moves so much faster than my grandmother's did.  And my son's world will move even faster than mine.  Yet if you look at my grandmother's world she was up from sunrise to sunset working hard; baking bread, cooking meals from scratch, canning fruits and vegetables from her own garden, washing clothes through a wringer machine and then hanging them on the line to dry; yet she found the time to put something of beauty and craftsmanship into her world with her quilts.   But we, with all of our technological advances that should give us more time in our day to get things done, still end up with no time left in our day to do the things we love.  How does that happen? I think we should take a lesson from my grandmother's generation and remember to always find the time for activities and crafts that put beauty and love into our lives.  

I challenge you to pick up a needle and thread and stitch some love into your world❣️