If you have a Bernina Jumbo Hoop for the 830 you are in excellent shape. The central diamond blocks will each stitch out in one hooping and the square blocks will each stitch out in two hoopings.

If you have a Mega Hoop (150mm x 400mm) or equivalent (Pfaff and Viking both have hoops that are 200mm x 360mm) you are also in great shape. The central diamond blocks will each stitch out in one hooping and the square blocks will each stitch out in 3 or 4 hoopings.

If you have a Large Oval Hoop (145mm x 255mm) or equivalent then you are in good shape – as long as you have a lot of patience. The central diamond blocks will each require two or three hoopings while some of the square blocks will require up to 9 hoopings.

Placement is super easy, with detailed instructions on the CD for how to mark the fabric for each block and align these marks with placement lines that should be stitched out directly onto the stabilizer in the hoop. Be sure to read the instructions before you start stitching!

Placement of applique shapes is also super easy! Once your background fabric has been put in place in the hoop, the next thing to stitch out is placement lines for each applique shape. Remove the hoop from your embroidery module while you fuse the prepared applique shapes in place. Some of the designs have layered appliques, so you will need to do 2 or 3 sets of placement lines each followed by fusing shapes in place.

Another question that came in today was about the thread colors used. Here’s the scoop on that!

Isacord thread was used for GO! Be Dazzled, in the following colors:

• 0811 Candlelight
• 2508 Hot Pink
• 2715 Pansy
• 4620 Jade
• 1010 Toast
• 2506 Cerise
• 2810 Orchid
• 4423 Marine Aqua
• 2550 Soft Pink
• 2510 Roseate
• 2830 Wild Iris
• 6011 Tamarack

If you want to do your own colors, here’s a formula I have been using with the students in my Block of the Month classes:

Choose 3 different fabrics – in the case of GO! Be Dazzled there are Regal Purple, Cerise and Daffodil from the Crystals collection by Benartex. For GO! Be Dazzled Too the fabrics used are Hunter, Sage and Cream from the Crystals collection by Benartex.

Now choose 2 or 3 threads to match each of the 3 fabrics, e.g. 2 or 3 different shades of yellow to match the Daffodil. This will give you 6-9 thread colors.

Now choose 2 or 3 threads that contrast with the fabrics. For GO! Be Dazzled, these were two shades of turquoise, and a bright lime green. If your 3 fabrics are different shades of the same color, then choose 2 or 3 threads of the complementary color. Check your color wheel if in doubt!

Hope this helps to answer some of the questions you may have. More coming on GO! Be Dazzled in the months to come. Feel free to drop me a line if you have more questions.

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
Thank you so much for teaching us how to use the sewing machine and may be once I will see you again.
Your friend,
Donya

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
You are a great sewer. You are so nice. I love the work you do.
Your friend,
Jaydah
p.s. Thank you so much!

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
Thank you for coming and helping us make the quilt. It was really fun.
Your friend,
Lucas

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
I loved doing sewing. It was awesome. The hearts were cool. Art Masterpiece was graet!!!
Sincerely,
Lexi

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
I loved sowing with you. I hope you will do it again.
From Danelle

Dear miss, vedeler
I really like how you make the quilts it is so interesting how you do it without getting hurt or anything else
Sincerely,
Gigi

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
Thank you for teaching us how to sow. It was very fun and the heart was really cool. I bet everybody liked it.
Have a great summer!!!
From, Cole

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
Thank you for what you’ve done in Art masterpiece. I loved the quilts that you made because you probably put a lot of hard work into making them.
Sincerely,
David

Dear Mrs.Vedeler
The quilts you had us make were so fun. I wish we could do it again.
(No name on this one)

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
Thank you so much for the wonderful quilt. Sewing is so cool! You are very good at sewing.
From Jake

Dear Mrs. Vedeler,
I think you were the best Masterpiece Art parent. You are so cool. I love when you come.
Your friend,
Kloe

Dear Mrs. Vedeler
Thank you for helping inart masterpiece. I saw how you do it and I was amazed. I also love the quilt we did. Thank you for coming to do that.
Thank you, from Tommy

All in all, I think it is very safe to say that these kids really enjoyed themselves!

I’m staying at the Best Western Normandy Inn & Suites with my two roomies, Donna Morales-Oemig (FollowThatThread.com) and Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero (KalCollections.com).

As hotels go it’s certainly not the swankiest, but it’s comfortable – and it has free Wi-Fi in the room which is a big plus in my book! I wasn’t sure when I first saw the building if the plaster missing from the outside walls was by design or because it fell off. Apparently it is by design – trying to imitate Old English Tudor styling.

This morning Donna and I took a walk to find some breakfast and got a glimpse of Downtown Minneapolis. It’s a mixture of old and new – towering glass sky scrapers next to ivy-clad brick buildings.

The reflections in the glass are quite spectacular, especially in the early morning sun.

Tomorrow will be a busy day – the first “official” day of the trade show. More photos to come!

Three weeks ago today I moved into a new home – twice as much space, with a dedicated studio which has really opened up the flow. Still a few boxes left to unpack and lots of sorting still to be done, plenty of room to dance, and I could even lay a king size quilt out on the floor – if I really wanted to!

The project that has taken up most of my time in recent weeks is my new design collection – GO! Be Dazzled – which was introduced to the world at large today in my School House at Quilt Market.

Do you recognize the GO! logo used on the cover? GO! as in AccuQuilt GO! the fabric cutter.

This quilt was created as a Block of the Month to specifically use the dies for the AccuQuilt GO! Each month 2 blocks are created – they can be identical or use diferent fabrics and/or thread colors.

Each month one or more of the following dies is used:

• GO! Circle 2″, 3″, 5″
• GO! Stars 2″, 3″, 4″
• GO! Hearts 2″, 3″, 4″
• GO! Funky Flower
• GO! Round Flower
• GO! Feathers

The title of my School House was:

Embroidered Applique Meets AccuQuilt GO!

Subtitle: A Match Made in Heaven.

It really is a match made in heaven! The biggest challenge that most people have with any applique project is creating the applique shapes. Using the GO! cutter and dies ALL of the challenges go away. No printing of templates, no tracing temlplates and no cutting on the line with a pair of scissors. Simply apply fusible webbing to your applique fabric, place the fabric on the die and crank the handle. Finished in seconds!

I’m pretty excited about my new collection – and I hope you will be too!

Here are some close-ups of the embroidery.

Due to a lot of requests, I have put together a thread chart for the Silk Hearts Quilt!

The numbers on the chart refer to the color numbers of the threads in the Silk Hearts Collection by Aurifil. Use the same colors that I used, or use your own choice – you really can’t go wrong!

Click on the Silk Hearts Thread Chart to download it.

Enjoy!

My Silk Hearts Quilt is such a quilt. I am very happy to announce the introduction of the Silk Hearts Collection – 16 fat quarters of silk dupioni, and 12 large spools of AURIfil Cotton Mako 50 wt – which provide everything you need to be able to create your own Silk Hearts Quilt, using the designs from my Hearts CD.

The Silk Hearts Quilt started out looking pretty plain when it was just blocks sitting on my design wall.

Then I added the hearts to get an idea  how it was going to look:

Then there was a lot embroidery, followed by a lot of quilting:

The quilt was finished with a piped facing – for no other reason than I did not have enough silk to put a traditional binding on! But I love the look – more about how to do it in another post.

Coming soon… detailed cutting intructions for the Silk Hearts Quilt.

This is the design that I started out with (created in CorelDRAW). For version 1 of the design, I imported the diagram into the Bernina Cutwork Software and used the tools available to transform the design into stitches with some parts cut out (the squares and the central star – all shaded grey). The stitchout for this was fit for nothing other than the garbage! The problem – I knew that it was a good idea to do some “running before” stitches to stabilize the space to be cut out, but did not know what a good offset would be, so I used an offset of 0.6mm. When the cutwork tool did it’s thing, it cut up all the “running before” stitches, so I ended up with some holes with very frayed edges! Further investigation (in the online manual) recommends an offset of 0.8mm.

For version 2 of the design I decided to go back to the Bernina Embroidery Software to create all the non-cutwork stitches, and only use the Bernina Cutwork Software to create the actual cutwork stitches. Here are the results!

This is all the “non-cutwork” stitching. I figured it was probably a good idea to do as much of this as possible before doing any cutting to maintain as much stability as possible in the fabric. I am using DellaQ’s silk taffeta (maybe not such a good idea for a first attempt!) backed with OESD Fusible Polymesh, and OESD Heavyweight Tear-Away in the hoop. I pinned the silk in place and then stitched out a tackdown line to ensure the fabric would not move.

The first part of the cutting process is the “running before” stitches. As mentioned above, I set the offset to 0.8mm – any smaller and these stitches get cut out!

Now the machine is telling me it is ready to start cutting with the tool set to Cut 1.

Here is the actual Bernina Cutwork Tool! You have hopefully already figured out that it works with the embroidery module. I am using the #26 foot. The tool fits into the needle casing, and the blade itself is about 2mm wide and 3/8″ long. The white dial rotates and has four settings, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Here it is in position 1.

The first round of cutting has been done. The left and right sides of the square have been cut – it’s a pretty clean line, more visible on the left than on the right. And just inside the “running before” stitches!

Now the machine is telling me it is ready for Cut 2.

It’s actually very easy to move from cutting position 1 to 2. Sitting down is probably a good thing – just so that you can see what you are doing!

After cut 2, four points on the star have been cut. The blade on the Bernina Cutwork Tool can essentially set to 4 different angles. Vertical and horizontal are always going to be very clean cuts, as are cuts at 45 degrees in both directions. Everything else is going to be cut using the optimum combination of vertical, horizontal and 45 degree cuts. The white showing in the center star is where the silk has begun to lift up, revealing the stabilizer underneath.

Now the machine is telling me it is ready for cut 3.

And finally it is ready for cut 4!

All the cutting has been done! A lot of the pieces are beginning to lift out of their own accord. At this point I removed the hoop from the machine so that I could gently remove all of the pieces which had been cut out. If I had thought about it in advance, I would have done this over the garbage can. As it is, I ended up with a lot of tiny pieces of fabric and stabilizer all over the floor! Some pieces needed a little help to come out, but only a few threads here and there needed clipping.

Here all the pieces have been removed. Some of the edges are cleaner than others. The fact that silk frays a lot anyway probably didn’t help me. A nice crisp fabric would give the best results – I have read that using spray starch on the fabric gives it a great hand for the cutting. However, I was not about to start spraying starch onto the silk!

Here are the results after the satin finishing stitch around the edges of the cutwork. You may notice that the larger star in the center has changed color, and is now turquoise. This is now showing version 3! I neglected to use some water soluble stabilizer underneath the satin stitches on version 2 – and the result was not a pretty sight! The extra stabilizer is necessary to give the satin stitch a solid foundation for stitching on. Without it, one side of the satin stitch is tring to stitch into nothing and the results are definitely not pretty. The settings for the satin stitch need some work. In places the “running before” stitches are showing through. I’ll let you know what I come up with to solve this problem!

I’m not sure if curiosity or the need for some sanity lead me to stitch the design out again, this time without doing the actual cutting. I wanted to have something to compare against, to see how clean the cutwork is when it is finished. When I have found the correct settings for the final satin finishing stitch, I think the finished cutwork will be very clean indeed!

Go to http://sarahvedelerdesigns.com/hearts-quilt-pattern/ to download your free copy now!

If you are a fan of stipple quilting, you may be very happy to know that you can now achieve perfect results with the new Stipple fill in Bernina Embroidery Software version 6!

Create a closed object, and from the Fill stitch dropdown list, select “Stipple Run”. In the diagrams below, I created two 6″x6″ squares. One has a single stitch outline to show the boundary of the stipple fill. The other contains the stipple fill!

The default settings are:

Stitch length = 2.5mm
Run Count = 1
Loop Spacing = 0.2 in
Inset Step = 1

Changing the Run Count does not make a visible difference in a screen print, but it does have a difference in the stitchout! Run Count can have values of 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9. A Run Count of 1 creates a single running stitch. A Run Count of 3 does “forward back forward” for each stitch. A Run Count of 5 does “forward back forward back forward” for each stitch. Etc!

In this example, the loop spacing has been set to 0.1 in. The stitch length has also been decreased to 2.0mm, to create a smoother line.

Setting loop spacing to 0.0 in creates a very tiny micro-stipple. The stitch length has also been decreased again, to 1mm. These stitches take a while to generate – so be patient after hitting Apply or OK!

This shows a 1″ square containing the tiny micto-stipple.

Inset Step defines the amount of space between the edge of the object and the stipple. In this example:
Stitch Length = 2mm
Loop Spacing = 0.2 in
Inset Step = 2.

Chances are you are not going to have a space that contains only Stipple fill! How about using it to quilt the area surrounding a design? In this example, I inserted a design from my Hearts CD over the top of the square containing the Stipple fill. Unfortunately, the Stipple fill is showing through the open spaces in the design.

What you really want to do is remove the stitches from underneath the heart. But the “Remove Overlaps” button is not active.

The easiest way to activate the “Remove Overlaps” button is to create an object containing a Step fill.

I ungrouped the Heart design (when you insert a design, all the elements of it will be grouped together), selected the Candlewicking stitch outline for the heart and changed it to a Step fill. Now if you select the Step filled heart the “Remove Overlaps” button is active – so click on it!

When you delete the Step filled heart you will fine that the Remove Overlaps has taken away all stitches underneath, including the rest of the heart. The easiest way to solve this problem is to re-insert the heart design.

 In this example:

Loop Spacing = 0.1 in
Inset Step = 3

As well as Stipple Run, you will also see Stipple Stemstitch and Stipple Backstitch on the fill stitch list. This example shows Stipple Stemstitch with the default settings, Loop Spacing = 0.2 in and Inset Step = 1.

Stipple Stemstitch has a much smoother line if you increase the Loop Count. In this example it has been increased to 0.4 in.

Stipple Backstitch looks very similar to Stipple Run, but when stitched out will give a nicely defined line – great if you want to give your quilting some more definition!