Large Scale Quilting on the Grace Qnique 14+
Last week I shared a video on how to quilt tiny designs on the Grace Qnique machine while working on my unfinished hand dyed wholecloth quilt. This week I decided to do the exact opposite and share a video on quilting BIG! See what I mean in this new video tutorial:
The most frequent question I still receive about the Grace Qnique is a stitch regulator. I covered this in the video on speed control – the sit down model of the Grace Qnique 14+ does not have a stitch regulator.
What you see in the videos is my ability to balance speed and movement precisely to create consistent stitches. It’s a skill, not a computer program, and it does take time to develop.
The good news is the more you quilt, the better you will get, and the more you quilt, the faster you will get better. It might not look either perfect or pretty in the beginning, but if you stick with it, it will get better!
For this week’s project, I decided to take the first step in creating a quilted book cover – actually quilting something that could be sliced up. In this case it’s a simple fat quarter of Studio E fabric and I decided it would be perfect to quilt and follow the water ring design in the print fabric with quilted rings.
I’ll probably go back over this with more quilting designs, but it definitely made me more aware of just how fast this machine can go, which means my hands can move much faster too.
This works great on a small sandwich like this which can so nicely fit into the 15 inches of space I have on this machine. I felt really comfortable quilting it even at the fastest speeds, but as you saw in the video, I couldn’t sustain that hectic pace too long. It was just too stressful.
So how will this work on a larger quilt? I’m planning to test that in a future video. I have some ideas for making the test even more interesting with fleece and minky fabrics, but more on that later!
Next week I’ll be back with a video on machine maintenance. I ran into an issue this week with inserting the needle and it really drove home the importance of getting all the simple things right in order for the machine to run it’s best.
Feel free to post any questions you have about this machine or suggestions for future videos in the comments below!
Let’s go quilt,
Leah Day
The hardest thing for me to do is the basting. I think it looks good, but then have too many puckers when I go to quilt it (on my home machine). I smooth and smooth it, but after several puckers, I pulled the flannel backing after smoothing and it did seem to help, but still had some puckers. Any suggestions?
I enjoyed watching you stitch the larger scale. I have a lot of tops to quilt this year and I would like to experiment with the larger scale designs. I have an Innova sit down long arm machine so these videos are helpful for me as well. Thank you,