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If you're new to quilting, you might fear the unknown. The unknown of quilting thinking "How should I put all the layers together?" Your goal is for a stress-free process but, oh, where do you begin? Today's guest has a solution. You use an embroidery machine and turn it into a quilting machine. Denise Abel is a colleague on the Sewing with Nancy team. She's here to join us with great ways of putting three layers of fabric together. Denise, you're going to enlighten us with ideas. Thank you, Nancy. In the first episode, we taught how to piece quilt blocks in an embroidery hoop. Now it's time to use the same machine for a quilting process. All the quilt layers are placed in the hoop then the computerized machine takes over. It couldn't be simpler. "Stress-free Quilting with Machine Embroidery" that's what's coming up next on Sewing with Nancy. Sewing with Nancy TV's longest-airing sewing and quilting program

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Baby Lock, a complete line of sewing, quilting and embroidery machines and sergers. Baby Lock, for the love of sewing. Madeira, specializing in embroidery, quilting and special-effect threads because creativity is never black and white. Koala Studios fine sewing furniture custom-built in America. Clover, makers of sewing, knitting quilting and embroidery products for over 25 years. Experience the Clover difference. Amazing Designs and Klass needles. During the first episode, Denise and I showed you several different quilt piece-in-the-hoop patterns. Denise, this is a very simplified Amish Shadow, or shadow block. We made these right in the hoop, and stitched on stabilizer. If you missed that you can watch on DVD, or go online at nancyzieman.com and watch the first episode of the series and find out all the details. You can see that four of these blocks were sewn together to create this interesting on-point design. You have a little lap quilt here, Denise that has been quilted. All three layers have been put together. That's right. The quilting is done all with the embroidery machine. It's important to look for embroidery designs that are designed for quilting. Right, what we need to look for is a quilting design that is triple straight stitched, or bean stitched what they call it in the embroidery industry. This is a half-square triangle design. Also, in this colorful section it's also a very big design. It's stitched in white so it's maybe not so evident. Let's put up the design so you can see what it looks like. Let me get it on-point. That's the way it is. It's a quilting outline design compatible and great to put together. We're going to put aside this top layer or this lap quilt and show you how to layer the three layers the top, the batting, and the backing together. We're not going to use safety pins. Right, that would cause a little issue with the embroidery machine. We want to go with a little bit flatter construction. We have the top layer that has been seamed the batting, and the backing. The batting and the backing are already sticking together. Denise, show how you suggest to baste them together in an unconventional way. It's very easy to "baste" the three layer together using an adhesive spray. You lightly spray the batting, always the batting and then you simply smooth on your top layer. Of course, you would do that with the backing onto the batting. as well. You get it somewhat basted. Another option, if you didn't want to use adhesive spray is to use paperbacked fusible web that comes in strips. We have another one of the processes that we're working on. We're working with 1/2"-wide tape and your iron. I'll go up here, about four or five inches apart. You just press and tear, press and tear. Then you'd remove the paper. In this lower section, we've already removed the paper on some of these designs. Now truth be told, removing the paper is the hardest part! You just get it started and remove it. Then you have, I don't know if you can see them but they're little shiny areas of the fusible web that's left. Then you sandwich the layers together. You'd do the same on the top fabric and press. It would be basted. Right, the adhesive on the tape secures all the layers together. Before doing the quilting, we suggest one other stitch. That's at the regular sewing machine. Here you can see that I'm stitching in the ditch, in the well of the seam just around the blocks. You don't have to stitch a lot, but it helps to stabilize. Exactly, it is stabilizing all three layers together, so there's no slippage when you're actually hooping the quilt together. Now we're ready to hoop this fabric. Just make believe this was stitched in the ditch. We have to do that sometimes, some virtual sewing. We're going to use a larger hoop if you have that on your embroidery unit and with that, some double-sided tape. We have the double-sided tape and as you can see we have our normal hoop here. We have our outer hoop and our inner hoop. What we want to do is we want to take the inner hoop flip it over. Take the double-sided tape run it right along the edges here. Then we take it and remove the tape. We have that end started. I've added it to the other three sides, removing the tape. Alignment is pretty easy, especially with this design. We have our quadrants and our alignment to match up with our alignment marks right on our hoop. It's very easy if you align-- The seams. Exactly. We'll show you a little bit later if you didn't have this alignment ability but this works great on many pieced quilt blocks. That hoop is not going anywhere. You have all your layers secured. We then take our outer hoop and place it underneath. Since that's not going to shift you have that tape behind there it's going to pop right into place and it's not going to shift at all. We have this aligned and ready to go. We can now start doing the embroidering. When writing the script for this segment of the program I called it "Quilting with Embroidery 101" just the basics. I think the basics that you need to understand or grasp is that even though this is an embroidery unit we're not using a stabilizer in the hoop which is often the case when embroidering. But rather, we have the three layers of fabric. The thread is not a rayon thread but a polyester thread that's recommended for embroidery both in the needle and in the bobbin area. Then your designs, and Denise will show those to you on her screen in just a few minutes. We're using two designs during this segment or the rest of this program. This full design that will go into the square and then the half-square triangle areas will have this design. They're compatible. That's something to look for in the embroidery designs. You'll find these in the book that accompanies the program if you are interested. But now, Denise, you're ready to put this hoop into the embroidery unit. You have a lot of fabric. Yes, we are ready to quilt. We have our quilt sandwich put into the hoop and we're ready to place it right on the embroidery machine. You just simply guide it right underneath the embroidery foot. Place it right into the embroidery unit. Because these layers have been basted together and then stitched in the ditch, you don't have to worry about them coming apart. You just want to make sure it's not causing a drag on the embroidery. Absolutely, you can prop it right up so that it doesn't put pressure onto the embroidery unit. Now the embroidery design is on your screen. We have the embroidery design loaded right into the embroidery machine. We're going to do a trace trial feature just to see where it lands on our block. That just gives us a little tracing of our outer-most areas. So you can see if you've got the right size. This is our 8" design but we have three other sizes that we could have selected as well. Now the magic happens. And we are quilting. If you've ever tried to free-motion quilt or hand quilt, you don't just sit there. That's the beauty of this. Watch that needle. It's going back and forth, back and forth three times in each stitch, so that it'll be very secure. Very secure. This is the bean stitch. It stitches onto itself three times before it moves on to the next stitch. As we mentioned, we have variegated thread. You certainly could use other thread types. It could be all-purpose thread, that could be an option. But again, you'd use the same in the needle as well as in the bobbin area. Watch how this is centered. How long does this take to stitch, Denise? This takes about three minutes and the machine does all the work. Sometimes with embroidery I say you can walk away from the machine and do other things. But because we have this fabric here you aren't guiding the fabric, but maybe you're holding it or propping it, so that it doesn't get in the way. You can definitely prop it up. We're just going to let this stitch. As this is stitching it's going right into the groove of the seams. You maybe just didn't see that part. But, wow, it lines up perfectly because you were able to center the hoop. Right on our stitching lines. We had a perfect guide with our piecing, our blocks to give us that hooping area. These are precisely digitized designs. They'll stitch the same every single time. There, it's going down the line. I like it when it does that. What other types of feather designs that you like to work with in quilt designs, or scrolls? Yes, there are numerous different types of embroidery designs that replicate quilting. Rather than having to do it free-hand quilting or by hand the embroidery machine does it all. You get the fun part of selecting the design picking the area of where it goes and pushing the start button. So there's more preparation than there is in the actual stitching part. It's a little contrary to traditional quilting where you just put it in the hoop and you either hand stitch or you free-motion stitch at the machine. We're almost done. Usually, you know, we don't have time to show a complete embroidery design on television, but because this is very quick I thought you should see the whole thing and watch the magic happen. Typical embroidery designs have a lot of stitching in it to fill in your area but here, we want our fabric to shine, as well. This is our pieced block from the embroidery machine. It's very easy to just sit back and watch it add the decorative stitching or quilting. If you would choose a traditional machine embroidery design that has a lot of fill stitches and satin stitches it wouldn't be compatible with the three layers of fabric. That's why we stress the importance of the running stitches that we have. Denise, I think you're almost there. We are almost done. I'll let you show the viewers when you take it out of the machine. You can see the design; it has been quilted. It's a nice weight of fabric or a nice weight, I should say, of all the layers put together and stitched. On this sample, Denise has stitched it in white. Then we're going to go through and show you how to stitch very close to an edge of fabric in "Quilting

with the Embroidery Machine

102." Now for "Stress-Free

Quilting with Machine Embroidery

102" and that is, working with templates. Denise and I have two methods to share with you. I've cut out the template for the half-square triangle that's going to be stitched in this section of the quilt block. I'd place it on the top of the fabric just the way I'd like it to stitch. Then just tape it down. We're not going to sew through this. It's just for positioning, right now. I have the sticky double sided basting tape on the underside of the hoop. As I place this on here you can see the lines do not extend to the marks to get it exactly lined up. Use a marking pen and mark the vertical line following the cross-hatch line on the template and then the horizontal line. Extend those lines out. Make sure you're using a washable marking pan. Place the inner hoop along those markings. Get them positioned. It sticks down. I've loosened the lower hoop, so that I can sink it. I think I can sink it in here. There we go. It works a little bit better on a flat surface. You sink it down, and then it should be lined up exactly. Then it's time to do the stitching. But if you have a camera feature on your embroidery machine which is common on some of the machines Denise is going to show you another option. We start much the same way. We have our template. We've trimmed this one a little bit further down. We position it where we want to stitch the quilting design. Place a little tape to make sure that the design stays in place. We then take the positioning sticker position that right at the center of the design right on the lines. Make sure to take time to align that right on the template. We then take our outer hoop and since we have the sticky right on that we eyeball it. You don't have to get this exact because you're going to see the magic that's going to happen in the machine. Then we take our outer hoop, position that and sink it right in. You really have to loosen that outer hoop to get all these layers then you could tighten it if you needed to. Here we have this little sticker. That's going to stay there for a little bit. Denise is going to show you how to align it. On my particular hoop because I now have it hooped into place I would remove the template and be ready to do the stitching just the way Denise did earlier. But Denise is going to share with you how to put it in the machine and use the camera feature if you have that on your machine embroidery unit at home which is now a quilting machine. Denise is ready to show you how the design now can become exact in the hoop because of the positioning sticker. This is an amazing feature. It's a very fun feature. It takes all the hard work about positioning your design right in the machine itself. First, you'll notice that in the hoop we have our quilt. We've also added additional batting on here. You'll see that if we didn't add that additional leader on there we wouldn't have a secure hooping because there would be air in this area. It's just an extra piece of the same batting you used so that you have kind of the same tension throughout the hooping. You can remove that, take out the zigzag stitch later on. We'll show the positioning. Right here on the screen you'll see we have our design loaded. We then select our find or scan feature. We'll scan our area. The machine is going to locate that positioning sticker. As it does that, it's calculating. If we're off a few degrees in hooping it's automatically going to rotate the design to fit that. It's recognizing and determining that. If we close this screen, you'll see our design has changed dramatically to work with our placement. It prompts you to remove the template so that you're not going to stitch the paper down. We really don't need that. And you're ready to go. We have our embroidery thread ready to go. It's starting to stitch. This only takes one minute to quilt this quilt design. While the machine is doing the work, I'll just show you some other types of quilting designs that are appropriate for stitching all three layers together. We have a floral design. I really like to choose quilting embroideries that are variegated or have a variety of sizes so that you're not always restricted just to one particular embellishment to stitch all layers together. It's a simple design, but elegant. The next little quilt I like to call it "tummy time" for babies to lie on the floor. We have some flannel fabric. Within the block, there's a square design with leaves and then a compatible embroidery design to stitch in the border area, so a larger design and flowing. So regardless of what you're working with make sure that you have, maybe two designs at the minimum maybe three at the maximum to integrate together into the design so that it's not always the same thing. This works out particularly well, Denise with that half-square triangle just to let the machine do the stitching. It does it exactly every single time. It's precisely digitized, so there's no work on your part. During this two-part series on stress-free quilting, we have pieced in the hoop. We have pieced the blocks on a stabilizer made them all identical and the same size, because the machine did the stitching. Layering the fabrics, hooping them. We've shown you three ways to hoop so that you can stitch the layers together again, using that machine. Denise, I thank you for sharing all these ideas with us. I hope that if you have a machine embroidery unit at home it'll be a quilting unit now. We take it for granted that when we need fabric we go to our favorite fabric store or order online. That wasn't the case in the 1930s and '40s when feed sacks were a common source of fabric. My Nancy's Corner guest has made it her quest to collect and tell the fascinating stories of feed sack fabrics. I'd like you to welcome Chris Motl. Chris is a collector of these fabrics and has stories from the sacks. Welcome back to Sewing with Nancy, Chris. Thank you very much. You started collecting feed sacks to make quilts. I did, I was a quilter and about 20 years ago reproduction fabrics from the 1930s were popular. That led to the feed sacks which were popular at that time. That's how I started collecting. What a beautiful quilt you made. Thank you very much. I used some of the novelty and conversation prints that are very popular and I just used a simple design to show off the fabrics. So the source of fabrics that you used and that tell the stories from the sacks start with this flour sack. This is an interesting sack. It's from the Hillbilly Flour Mills in Texas. It's owner, W. Lee O'Daniel, ran for governor in 1938. He thought, well, if he didn't become governor he would sell a lot of flour. He was used to promoting his flour on the radio. He took his Hillbilly Boys Band on the road and campaigned. The "Flour, Not Pork" barrels were passed around by his children to collect donations. He did win the governorship and actually went on to become a senator from Texas. A precious print, a lot of interesting stories. It is, and we can date this one because of the 1938 campaign. It's history in flour sacks, interesting. Right, another interesting print is from the Percy Kent Bag Company. They've called it Kent's Cloth of the United Nations. It has some of the battles from World War II some of the early UN nations. We do know that it's after Pearl Harbor, but before D-Day because there's no depiction of D-Day on here. My favorite happens to be the "bad eggs" in the frying pan Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito. You know, patriotism was very, very important in World War II. This particular sack has the Morse Code for victory. Oh, interesting! So it has the Vs, and then the dots and dash for victory. How fascinating. Isn't that fun? It is, it is. It's also in the patriotic colors of red, white and blue. Walt Disney was a great promoter, of course and he was putting his license on toys. Way back then? Way back then, for children. One of the bag companies got the exclusive license to do the Disney designs on their feed sacks. Let's turn this one around. It has Walt Disney's Cinderella Walt Disney Productions on it, and also, Alice In Wonderland. You know, we think of licensing as something that's kind of a new thing relatively but it isn't. No. It goes way back to feed sacks. The fabric is soft. The fabric is. They promoted it as being a finer percale than previous feed sack fabrics. They could be flour sacks or feed sacks. Probably flour sacks. The feed sack term kind of encompass flour sacks and sugar sacks. About how much yardage is in a feed sack? About a yard and a quarter. They're 36" wide, and generally 40" to 45" long. Okay, so a good amount of yardage. You have a little story there. I do have a little story. This is Biddy the Cat from the Bemis Bag Company. Her owner brought her to the bag factory to control the mice. She ended up becoming a symbol of that company. She is on a lot of their bags. I've got one here with Biddy up in the corner. This is a bag that they designed for quilters. So here's Biddy. It's kind of hard to see, but there's Biddy. Biddy sneaking out of the bag. The owner thought that was great. It meant that he had nothing to hide by letting the cat out of the bag. One of the Bemis executives saw his grandmother's flower garden quilt and thought that would be a great design. They put a label on, and a booklet inside the sack explaining how to make a quilt top. Chris, what wonderful examples. What great stories. Thank you for sharing them. Thank you. If you'd like to have more information on Chris and her feed sacks, you can go to nancyzieman.com and click under Nancy's Corner. Also at nancyzieman.com, please watch 52 of the most recent Sewing with Nancy programs sign up for my blog, or Facebook, or social media. Thanks to Denise Abel for being my guest during this two-part series on "Stress-Free Machine Quilting." Thank you for joining me. Bye for now. Nancy and Denise Abel have written a fully illustrated book entitled "Stress-Free Quilting with Machine Embroidery." That includes all the instructions from this two-part series, plus free embroidery designs. It's $14.99, plus shipping and handling. To order the book, call 1-800-336-8373 or visit our website at sewingwithnancy.com/2718. Order Item Number BK2718 "Stress-Free Quilting with Machine Embroidery." To pay by check or money order call the number on the screen for details.

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