April 2012 FMQ Challenge Video Tutorial Text

The actual tutorial for the April 2012 FMQ challenge can be found by click this link.

This post is for those that are participating in the April 2012 FMQ Challenge and wish to be able to use Google/Translator for a text narrative to follow, while watching the video tutorial for this challenge.  

As we have participants in this challenge, from all over the world, I am trying the best I can to ensure that those that do not speak English and/or prefer the ability to use Google/Translator to assist, I did my best to watch the video tutorial and create a text narrative.  I hope this helps.

Don Linn’s FMQ Video translation, by SewCalGal (not an audited translation by Don Linn, nor anyone else).

Hi!  My name is Don Linn. And, I’d like to welcome you to the April session of the macgine quilting challenge.  

I began my quilting adventure over 15 years ago as a longarm quilter doing quilting for other people.  

Currently I’m concentrating on designing quilts, writing books, and teaching machine quilting and piecing classes. 

If you’d like to learn more about me, I suggest you check out my website at mrquilt.com 

You may also want to check out my latest book “free motion machine quilting”.  I’ll show you a picture of the cover right now. 

Today I’m going to show you a design transfer technqie that will allow you to transfer designs to your quilt top. So lets get started with this video. 

To do this design you’ll need a quilting you’ll need a few simple tools along with a quilting design that you want to transfer to your quilt top. 

I’m going to work from my book “Sophisticated Stitches”.  It is a book of line drawings intended for machine quilting, or other types of needle work. 

Flipping open, I’m going to quickly go to a design I’ve selected.  I’m going to use this abstract flower.  Now I’m going to show you how you can take and break this design up and use elements of this design, or other designs, to create your own unique design. 

First thing I’m going to do is make a photocopy of the design here. And, I’ve done that and it is right here.  I’m going to take a pair of scissors and cut away the round parts of the design.  I’m just going to use a pair a paper scissors. 

And you begin to see that you can use designs from almost anywhere.  You will not be limited to using plastic stencils that we’ve all been dealing with for years.  Problem that I found with plastic stencils are that they never seem to fit the area that I wanted to put my quilt design in. 

I find a stencil that I like, but it is too big or too small.  It never precisely fits the area that I want to fill. 

With this technique you can any design you like. And blow it up or reduce it to fit the area you want to do your quilting in. 

So I’m just about done here. You do not need to be terribly accurate in this cutting process. 

Now, I’m going to take a 2^nd copy, the original.  I’m going to overlay this one on top of it.   

Line up the original veins in the flower so they come up in the little Vs.  I’ll Tape this down. 

Now I  have my own unique design that we are going that were going to  transfer to a piece of fabric in just a few minutes. 

The next thing you’ll need, I’m going to set this aside for a few minutes. 

Next thing you’ll need is a wooden embroidery hoop. The kind we all seem to have laying around. 

And you’ll need some fine mesh tulle fabric.  If you are working on a lighter colored fabric, you’ll need a piece white  tulle.  If you are working on a dark fabric,  you’ll need a piece of black tulle. I’ll explain more of this in a couple of minutes.

Next step.  Take your wooden embroidery hoop.  Take it apart.  Put your tulle on top of the inner circle of the hoop.  And stretch it into the hoop as tightly as you can.  You don’t want it to be baggy, but you don’t want to pull on it so hard that its going to tear.  This is not the stoutest material in the world. 

Tighten your hoop down.  Tighten the screen down.  We are ready to go.  You can see that it stretched in their. 

Take the design and place the wooden embroidery hoop with the tulle in it, so that the tulle is pressing against the fabric, flush on the table.   

I’ll now take my sharpie marking pen and I’m going to trace over the design with the sharpie marking pen.  I want to try to be as accurate as I can, so the design is as accurate possible. This will take a few minutes, but it is worth time well spent if you will take your time and accurately do the transfer. 

I spin this around so I can get good access to the part that I’m working on, as we are going. 

To me, accuracy is everything.  It is the most important thing.  If you start off accurately, it will tend to be more accurately later on when we are actually doing the stitching process on our quilt top. 

I strive to be as accurate in all of my work as possible.  Not to say that I always succeed, but that is definitely my goal.  Now, I’ll take just a couple of more minutes here and we’ll have it done. 

Usually in my classes I don’t go thru this whole design transferring, I just show the basic technique.  But I want to make sure everyone in the audience can see the whole process. Cause I think it will make more sense if you do see how it is completely done. 

Just about there.  Alright.  Looks like I have the whole thing outlined.  So now when I lift it up, hopefully you can see this. There, you can see it better that way.  I grab a clean sheet of paper and lay it down. I think it will be better.  You can see it is in the form of a light line transferred onto the tulle. 

What I will do next is take this to my ironing board and set my iron on a nylon setting and be cautious, but heat set the design so I don’t have to worry about any transfer to fabric.  I always recommend you testing this on a piece of muslin first to ensure that there isn’t any residual of the permanent marking pen. 

Now, as I mentioned earlier, if you have a dark fabric that you are going to be putting a quilt design on, you’ll want to use a black piece of tulle along with a silver sharpie marking pen.  I’ll do this very quickly and show you on a piece of Indigo fabric how this works. 

I’ll make my line with my silver sharpie.  I then grab a piece of this indigo fabric and lay the tulle on it and their you can see the mark that I made.  So that is what you would use. That would be your design.  That is what we’d transfer on to the dark fabric.  I’ll go through that in a minute. 

Ok, I’m back.  We are going to finish the design transfer process on to this piece of muslin.  First, I want to make sure that I take my sharpie marking pen and put it as far away. 

For this process today, I’m going to use the water eraseable blue marking pen, which I’ve been using for years.  You could also use the new Frixion pen that people are using, chaulk pencils will work any marking device of your choice.  So long as it is like a pencil. 

I’m going to trace over this.  It may be a little bit hard to see when I’m done, because of the lighting in the room. 

In reality, when I’m doing my quilting I don’t want it to be darker than it is necessary to see when I’m doing my stitching. 

I’m going to trace over it.  It will take me a couple of minutes.  Again, trying to be as accurate as possible. So that I have an accurate design to work with when I’m doing my stitching. 

You can see I’m spinning this design a lot.  If I was doing this on a quilt top I wouldn’t have this luxury probably, so I  would do this process standing up, so I could work my around this design as easily as possible. 

I’ve been using this design technique for over ten years.  It has opened up a whole new world of possibilities of designs that I can incorporate into my quilts to make them very unique, rather than dealing with plastic stencils, which can add up to a lot of money in a short amount of time.  

Tulle is about $1.25/yard (US), so you can see it is a very inexpensive technique to use.  It will work well for all of your quilts.  

Another thing. If you want to use this size design on a block in the interior of your quilt and you want the same design in a corner stone out in the border, all you would have to do is reduce the size of the design and then go thru this process to mark the design in your corner stone.  You certainly wouldn’t have this luxury if you were using a plastic stencil.  You’d never probably find two stencils the right size.  

Hopefully it will be dark enough you can see on camera.  Alright, there you are.  You can now see that this design has been transferred to your fabric. 

Now we can sandwich that and actually do stitching by machine (or hand, but this is a machine quilting challenge, so hopefully that will be what you will be doing). 

If you were going to the same thing with a dark fabric, say an indigo fabric.  Then, we would lay tulle stretched in the hoop and use a  chaulk pencil would work best to transfer the design on to fabric. 

I’m going to get a chaulk pencil and I’ll be back in just a minute and you can see exactly what I’m talking about. 

I’m back with a piece of Indigo Fabric and my black tulle. 

You can see that line I have drawn earlier with my silver sharpie.  When I take a chaulk pencil I will trace over the design just like that.  I’ll lift the tulle up, which is stressed in a hoop, as before.  You can see that your design is transferred to your fabric. 

Very versatile.  Will work on virtually any color fabric so long as you have the right marking tool for the fabric.