Come Stitch With Me

Don’t know about you, but the cost of everything has gone up so much that I’m having to be much more selective about the events I attend. This includes quilt retreats, shows and seminars.

My main goal for 2024 quilty travel is to attend events in places I’ve never been before. Prioritizing my quilty travel list was hard. I have 5 possible destinations on the list – mostly regional with one biggie trip in the mix.

The only booked event so far is a trip to QuiltCon in Raleigh, NC next February. I’ve purchased my tickets and reserved my hotel room. Excited to meet up with some quilty peeps I haven’t seen in a while!

The rest of 2024 quilty travel is still TBD. Rest of 2024 travel plans will be determined by whether not I attend the Mackinac Island Quilting Arts Seminar next May, in Mackinac Island, Michigan. Cost and registration details are supposed to drop any day now, so I’ve been checking the FB site frequently. Who knows, hubs may want to tag along. This is a bucket list destination for both of us.

Should the Mackinac Island trip not materialize, I have plenty more options on my list, plus any other offerings I might learn about along the way.

Yours truly will be teaching this class on Saturday, October 14, 2023 from 10:00 a.m. – noon at the Southeastern Quilt & Textile Museum in Carrollton.

We’ll be using the pattern Memi’s Lemons by Fran Gulick of Cotton + Joy to create our table runner. Class fee is $50.00 and a printed copy of the pattern (which includes templates) is included with the class. A supply list and registration details may be found here.

This class is for confident beginners and up. Skill levels and sewing speed vary widely; however, students should be able to complete 1-2 lemon blocks during class.

Curved piecing isn’t difficult with a few helpful tips and a little practice.

Come conquer your curved piecing fears once and for all!

Fabrics used in table runner pictured are from the designer’s Daybreak collection, background is Confetti Cottons in Riley White and binding/backing are a discontinued Liberty print from my stash. Machine quilted by me using Glide 40 wt. thread in Cream.

Hopefully, I can save you time and frustration.

I was trying to program my 8900 to make a single clasp stitch, tie off and cut the threads so my student could easily machine tie/tack her quilt. I dutifully followed the instructions on page 78 in the manual, but could not for the life of me find the L.S. stitch on the stitch chart across the top of the machine. (BTW pressing the tie off button above the reverse button didn’t work either when trying to program the stitch combination.)

It’s not there. Nor is it specifically mentioned in the manual where to find it.

However, take a look at Figure 3 on page 84 in the manual. The square represents a blank space and next to it is the elusive L.S.! You can find the L.S. stitch between stitches 143 and 144 using your jog dial:

The blank space and L.S. stitch feature can also be found right before the Utility, Heirloom, Quilt, Satin, Bridge, Long and Pictograph stitch groups as you rotate through the stitches using the jog dial. Again, it’s not reflected the stitch chart nor in the manual, but know that it’s there!

Here’s a screenshot of what my clasp stitch programming looks like. We found it’s easier to unplug the foot pedal and use the start/stop feature to make clasp stitches while machine tying/tacking a quilt.

You can bet I saved that stitch sequence to my machine’s memory bank, too!