Adventures in Learning! Whoop Whoop!

Learning curve?  How about learning circles and sharp right corners, a few zigzags, and mountains, and cliffs?  I have been playing with my Avante, determined to learn all that I can about different longarm quilting techniques.  

After loading my first real quilt (not the "what was I thinking when I bought this fabric" practice runs), getting it all pinned on the frame, rolled and and clamped and ready to go, I realized I had it loaded wrong.  Of course!  If there's a wrong way and a right way, I prefer the wrong way.  I learn so much doing things at least twice :-D  After much consultation with the manual (!!!) and the DVD that came with the machine and YouTube, I decided backing-and-forthing among directions was the long way down that road.  So I now have a "Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, etc." list hanging on the wall beside the machine!

So, anywayz, finally I was on the correct path, and fooled around with free motion quilting, and had a wonderful time!  After doing FMQ on my Janome, this was easy in a way, but also harder.  When you write with a pencil on paper, you leave the paper stationary (no pun intended) while you move the pencil around over it.  That's longarm quilting, right?  Well, I had spent the last few years unlearning that, and learning to use the pencil fixed while moving the paper around method.  They say it's hard learning new stuff as we get older.  Not only did I have to learn new stuff, but I had to unlearn the technique I learned while unlearning how to write on paper!  Trust me, you'll know what I'm talking about if you go from one technique to the other!!

But wait!  There's more!  While doing research and learning all I could from books and YouTube before I got my Avante, it sounded like pantographs are the easiest way to quilt, fast and done-done in no time at all.  YAY!!  I'm ready for that.  

You talk about unlearning!?!?!  Honey, you ain't seen nothing like unlearning while learning to use a panto.  Picture this: you're walking back and forth at the back of the machine tracing a piece of paper with a laser light, all the while trusting that it's coming out like it's supposed to on the quilt, because you're not even looking at the quilt.  What???!!!  The process also caused some more steep learning curves -- remember the wrong way that I like to do?  Those flowing lines of quilting designs, smooth and nesting together, row after row, that you get when you do pantos?  Um, well, not exactly.  Although the quilt is quilted, it's not quite as advertised.  I think I'm going to have to go back to the directions -- the books, DVDs, YouTube -- how's that done again?  I can do this.

Meanwhile, I have a tablerunner on the machine right now.  (It's loaded correctly!)  I have the ruler base on, and at hand I have those neat-o rulers I had to get right away because I can do ruler work with no problem, easy-peasy.  Ooooo-kay.  Easy-peasy?  Not so much.  But I am getting the hang of it, and while it looks pretty darn good on top where I used invisible thread, the bottom.. well, let's just say I've added "Step 7: use only busy backing fabrics with same color threads."  It's still dark-thirty this morning, so I don't have a picture of that process.  (What?  Plan ahead?  Take pictures in daylight the day before?  Well, yes, but I forgot it was going to be Friday.)

So my plan for the continuing studies of longarm quilting will include marking tops, with stencils and my own designs.  That will be the easiest technique of all, right?


A big Whoop Whoop! for me -- I'm persistent, anyway!  Go to Sarah's blog here: http://confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot.com/2011/07/can-i-get-whoop-whoop-start-your.html for more Whoop Whoop! progress reports!