Tag Archives: quilt blocks

How to work with a large quilt? I HAVE ANSWERS!!!

I do have a ton of experience stitching and creating embroidery, I have not done much sewing. If I could program the embroidery machine to sew for me, that was a good day! Then McDreamy came along (he is my Brother Dream Machine 2) and everything changed! The DM2 is an incredible embroidery machine, but also one of the best sewing machines out there. So now I have to learn to sew and quilt!

I am still working on sewing…I generally give it a try and then pick it out until I get it right. Yep, trial and error. I am getting better at it each time I try, and I do learn something new. How am I supposed to move the quilt around? What about embroidery???

My big problem was sewing and quilting LARGE QUILTS. It is hard to get the whole quilt moved around so everything lines up, sew a bit, and then do re-arranging again and a bit of sewing again. It is a lot of hard work! Since I am not an amazing quilter or sewer, just about anything will make my stitches crooked. So. What the heck can I do to make this easier? I don’t want to give up. I found the solution, and I am super happy.

What solves all of my large quilt quilting problems?

THE WEIGHTLESS QUILTER, BY DIME!!! (here is the link if ya wanna check it out https://www.shop.dzgns.com/collections/quilting/products/weightless-quilter )

The best part? you don’t need any additional equipment to get this to work – it is adaptable to any desk and any sized quilt. Even better, it has a small footprint, so if you only have a smaller working space like I do, the Weightless quilter fits right in! I was so happy to make quilting easier for me. Check out my set up!

Sew easy to set up and use
Sew much easier – no pulling and stress on arms and shoulders
I can do this!!

How will this work for embroidery? After all, that is what I do best! All you have to do is make your quilt sandwich (same steps as sewing) and grab your Snap Hoop Monster – the biggest one you have!!! and find a gorgeous machine embroidery quilting design. Press start. Watch the magic happen!!!

This is going to look amazing!

I am loving this solution – it is FANTASTIC and so easy to use! I will be working more with the Weightless Quilter, so stay tuned for more embroidery experiments and tests. So far, this is EXCELLENT!

I am so happy!

Until next time,

Sue Brown

(a happy weightless quilter)

Be creative with embroidery designs!

transform a quilt block design into a gorgeous shirt design

Be creative with your machine embroidery designs! The quilt block embroidery design is from Anita Goodesign All Access May 2019 issue. I love the design, but I didn’t want to make a quilt block, although it is a very pretty quilt block – and the other embroidery designs in the collection. I had to think a little bit about it and get really creative.

Now, I am not telling you to change embroidery designs or edit them in any way, BUT you can get creative with what you have. I do not resize the quilt block embroidery design, but I remove some parts and group the rest of the objects so I can play around with the center design.

PLEASE NOTE: even though I edited and took apart the original embroidery design, it still belongs to Anita Goodesign – it is still their design. If you make changes to embroidery designs, it doesn’t mean that you can own that design – it is still the property of the original digitizer. Ok, whew, I just wanted to make that clear and make sure that no one gets any funny ideas. LOL. It’s kind of important to make that clear.

Also it should be made clear that you should not resize stitch file designs at all. You can really make a mess of it, and your embroidery machine will not be happy!! Remember the saying (say it with me now) STITCH FILES ARE FOR STITCHING. Yep, you got it!

I remove some of the parts, group and arrange some other parts and end up creating a design that is perfect for my shirt.

For more details on how I created this gorgeous shirt design for ME (I had to have something cool to wear to the Anita Goodesign Garage Sale next week), wait for the video that will be released tomorrow. The video will show you how I set up the designs and put them together to make a new (ish) design.

The next video, I will show you how to place the design and mark them with the little snowman dudes for perfect placement. I will also record the stitch out.

Be creative – remember the sky’s the limit! Start off with professional digitized designs and get the best embroidery results!

Until tomorrow!

Sue Brown

OML Embroidery/OML Embroidery University