I was so happy with Hatch Class number 2’s design, I decided that I would like to work with it a little bit and do some beautiful quilting and piecing work with it.  You can use just about any design for this, it doesn’t have to be from the class.  I am just using the class design for this blog, because I found it inspirational.  Whatever inspires you, work with it! t am not much of a sewer or quilter, I much prefer having my embroidery machine do most of the work!  The results are consistent, pretty close to perfect and you don’t have to worry about cutting any straight lines.   I like these things 🙂

I looked at the design and I thought it needed a frame of some sort with some pretty fabric.    Here is the final design that I came up with, and i had this in mind before I started working:

THINGS YOU WILL NEED FOR THIS PROJECT:

Embroidery design for the middle, scraps of materials or the top, bottom and sides of the quilt square, thread for your design, scissors (of course, LOL) stabilizer, small amount of quilt batting and of course an embroidery digitizing software, embroidery machine and a sewing machine.  Naturally, you will need some form of digitizing program to create the quilting lines, and we will be using Hatch in this blog post, but this will work with any digitizing program that you use.  I also suggest that you have a printer, so you can print out each step of the design and the quilt piecing – Hatch has an absolutely fantastic printing function that will print out pages that give you all of the information that you need – along with larger icons that show you the part of the design that you are stitch – and in order- so that helps keeps everything straight when you are working.

I decided that i want it to have some nice blue fabric and a pretty saying to go with it.

The first thing you need to do is get all of your materials together, and of course pick the design and the bits of fabric that you need for the project.  I decided how large the final design would be, and picked my fabrics.

I only needed a little bit of each of the fabrics, so I cut them into more reasonable sizes to use for the in the hoop piecing.  No need to be perfect about the cutting, we are going to let the embroidery machine fix everything for us as we go along.  If you have scraps, you can use them as well – its a perfect way to use up fabric scraps as long as they are big enough.

The next thing I like to do is pick out all of my thread that I am going to need to stitch out, at least for the centre design on this one – this took a little bit of searching for all the colors that I needed!  Once I got them all out, I was ready to go on my new thread rack!

Now that I have everything ready and all set out – don’t you love my organization?- i am ready to add a few simple lines in my digitizing software to make the quilt square come to life!  The digitizing part is quite easy  – the basic design is already done – in this project we are using a cool class design – but pick whatever inspires you with the material you have – and the rest of the digitizing is going to be some strategically placed lines around the embroidery design!  There is much more work to do in the hoop than there is digitizing.

The next blog will be working on the computer to make the quilting part of the design – I will work through it step by step so you understand about the lines and the color changes.

Happy digitizing, and happy quilting too 🙂