I want a longarm machine!

Angela warned me that this would happen!

I made my quilt for our guild’s Robert Kaufmann No Prints Allowed Challenge. We received a giant pile-o-charm packs from Robert Kaufmann Kona Solids Fabrics back in December.

Each member of our guild picked the colorway they liked best and were challenged to create a quilt by the March meeting using only solids. The rules:

• nothing but solid fabric
• use as many additional fabrics as you wanted
• must use every color in the charm pack somewhere on the quilt- even if it is a tiny 1″ square on the back!

We had our “reveal” in March and there were soooo many amazing quilts! Here are just a few:

I only had the top done on mine because I knew I wanted to quilt it myself, rather than pass it off to Angela. I also knew that I was only comfortable doing straight line quilting on my home machine. Luckily, Mary Anne from the KCMQG used to live in the area of San Diego where we currently do. She knew about a shop that rented time on their Gammill longarm machine. I signed up and took the class, which is required in order to rent time on the machine.

Sue, the owner of Quilter’s Paradise, was the instructor and we learned so much during the two classes. There were four students so we got plenty of time on the machine. I was able to sign up to quilt my challenge quilt last Sunday and I am so incredibly excited about how well it went. (Side note: use  the Robert Kaufmann quilt calculator app? This Quilter’s Paradise would be the same ones who created the calculators for that app!!)

Two hours and forty-five minutes after I walked in the door, the quilt was finished. Angela had given me some pointers to be able to do the design I was aiming for. We doodled some together and I felt confident with the combination of her free motion advice, Sue’s instruction for running her machine and the lovely invention known as the stitch regulator!

I did draw on each row as I rolled it on the machine- so that I wouldn’t stitch myself into a corner (center of the block) and not know my way out. There are six rows in my quilt and I did each one in one pass- the needle started and stopped exactly six times in the entire quilt top (not counting sewing around the outside edge).

The back shows the design a bit better, and you can see where I included a handful of charm pack colors I didn’t use on the front.

It’s all washed, dried and bound now. The disappearing ink has finished the disappearing act. I’ll take some photos in the daylight and post them tomorrow!

Now, I totally want a longarm machine. Too bad ‘want’ and ‘need’ are two very different things. Instead, I’ll happily keep renting from Sue while we’re living in San Diego. Now about that move back to KC…. hmm….. maybe I’ll talk my mom into buying one for herself!  What do you think, mom?