Thank you, Nancy. What you say makes sense and is also useful for me because, while I have the Bernina 830, I also have the much, much smaller Bernina 380 for travel and it does not have all the bells and whistles of the other machine, so I need to be able to do things without the benefit of dual feed as well.

I did the log cabin Laura's way because I'd never done one before, but while I was sewing I realized that I would much prefer to precut my pieces as I do for the pineapple blocks. I found that precutting and lining up the different pieces makes the process go much faster with the pineapple quilt. For the log cabin, I think I would like precut pieces because I would not have to trim afterwards and probably the need to ease a seam would be less likely with precut pieces.

Hi Renata - In general, if you need to ease one side when piecing two things together, the longer piece should go on the bottom so that the feed dogs can help you ease it in. With your dual feed system, this may not make a difference. And if your cutting and piecing are perfect, again it won't make a difference. Unless there is a good reason to go the other way, I sew the sashing on with the sashing on top since the sashing is usually narrower than the blocks and I feel like I'm less likely to have the pieces slip at all when I can see more of each piece. I also sew log cabin blocks with the log on top since I precut my logs. Laura did it the other way because she cuts her logs after sewing so it's easier to have that long piece of fabric on the bottom and keep adding blocks on the top. That's my opinion....

Nancy

Hi Rosemary - A good place to learn about how to quilt your quilt is http://mqresource.com. This Web site is a resource for professional longarmers, although anyone can follow and post. They have one forum called "Design Help Needed" where people post a finished quilt top and ask for advice on how to quilt it. You can learn a lot from these guys! They also have a "The Final Product" forum where people show what they've done and take close-up pictures of the quilting. Margo suggested this site on some forum months ago and I've been lurking there ever since.

Nancy

Grazie, Rita e Wendy! I pressed my fabric, cut all my sashing, sat at the machine, ready to go and then thought: sashing... on the top or the bottom?... and was stumped, especially since with the log cabin, the squares were on top of the strips... Back to sewing! Thanks for the quick reply!

I sew with sashing on top if the seams all go one way otherwise with the seams on top so I can make sure they don't get caught up. This isn't an answer by someone who knows

I'm cutting my sashing and finding it very stressfull in case my calculations are wrong. Too late now my fabric is all in bits :shock:

Renata, I always sew with the sashing on top (if I remember) because it will be straighter and without any give unlike the pieced blocks. I am not an expert though.

Good question, Renata. I'll wait to hear from some of our experts before I do my sashing, too.

I didn't sew today, but I've been organising and sorting and cleaning my sewing room. Quite the challenge! I forgot I have fabric with little light bulbs on it...I think I used it for an eye spy quilt. But you, know, the light bulbs these days aren't the same. Today's ones are all twirly. The next generation of kids won't know what an 'old fashioned' light bulb looks like. Kinda like a recent "what does " Winding your watch mean?" - or 'What's an iron" as we've discussed. LOL

Sorry for the simple question (I know, there is no stupid question...), but I want to get this right--not quilt police-fearing right, but easier to sew and not distort right: to put on the 6 1/2" sashing, is it better to but the sashing on top of the block when sewing or better to but the block on top? How about for the long horizontal sashing? Ready to sash...

And she was a guest in show no 912.

Thanks for the heads up on her, Nancy, a good reminder. I guess what I am really after is to see different ideas of how to approach designing the quilting to fit the piecing - there is so much information available for piecing, blocks,colour theory, applique..... but it is much harder to find information about how to go about designing the quilting side of things - ok rant over. But boy am I glad that I watched the latest show, with Ricky's top 5 machining tips, the one for cutting the thread has been a sanity saver today, as I am starting & stopping all over the place (sigh), still love the design, but it is a heavy old blanket to push & pull about

Nancy, I have Pam Clarke's book, Quilting inside the Lines, thanks for bringing her name up--time to relook it. I can imagine it being helpful for the sampler quilt.

Rosemary -

Yep, designing continuous line patterns is an art in and of itself. How far you go with that depends on how important your design is to you. You can do any hand quilting design by machine, you just might have to do a lot of backtracking and a lot of starts and stops. When I quilted Jayhawks on a quilt (you can do a web search on "jayhawk" to see what that looks like), I wanted the Jayhawks to be just like the true image so I downloaded a "coloring book" image and traced around it, doing whatever backtracking was necessary. I looked for a path that would have the least backtracking, which ended up being starting where the head meet the body and doing the body, then going around the head. This image is pretty much all connected so I was able to do it with just 2 starts and stops, if I remember right.

If the exact lines in the motif are less important, you can start adding, removing and moving lines to make it more continuous. What I found helped me to visualize how to make a motif continuous was looking at the paths given for continuous line quilting stencils and for continuous motifs in books. There are tricks you can do where, depending on how your motif looks, you can divide it into an inside and outside line, start where these meet and then do the inside and move to the outside. One particular author/teacher who I've found useful in learning to visualize this is Pam Clark. She specializes in quilting blocks and sashing at the same time by following paths around the quilt that allow her to hit everything and fill in the insides when she gets to them. I don't know how to describe this in words, but I think it's worth looking for her stuff.

Hope this is a little bit helpful!

Nancy

Thanks for the comments! I'm ready to do sashing and see how it all hangs together. Coni, the surprise fabric in the log cabin is the innermost light row that touches on the center square. It's a SewBatik metallic and while it looks goldish yellow, when placed beside the pink it picks up some rosy undertones. That color was nowhere in the sampler, just like the blue with purplish undertones in the dark outermost square, but I though toned down the magenta-like purple that was also used for the sawtooth star block. The blue fabric was a SewBatik scrap.

Renata - Love the log cabin blocks. They have a wonderful splash of color. Can't wait to see them all put together.

Nancy

BJ there is no such thing as cheating - just freedom of expression!

Renata your log cabin block is beautiful. I really love your fabrics. And yes that is a blue sky behind the quilt. We have had a heat wave here for the last week or so - very pleasant weather, finally.

Thanks everybody for the kind and encouraging comments.

And Rosemary, I don't think your wish is going to be granted about help with the quilting part. Seems like the buck is being passed to Patsy Thompson. I have found it very useful to look at all the TQS and Youtube tutorials I can find on FMQ for domestic machines but also for long-arm machines. I think the long-arm quilters have the continuous line quilting pretty well sorted. And then the other thing I do is I use up all the kids old copy books just practicing drawing continuous line ideas. Good luck with quilting your Too Loud/Dog Rose 1, can't wait to see what you do with it.