Sarah Vedeler Designs

I’m sitting at gate C2 of terminal 4 at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport – waiting for my flight to Houston to arrive. I’m on my way to Fall International Quilt Market, which happens every October at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Hundreds of exhibitors and thousands (hopefully!) of quilt store owners come together to find out what’s new in the quilting world.

I’m excited to be going to Quilt Market in Houston for the first time. On Friday I will be doing a “schoolhouse” called “Embroidered Applique for Beginners”. It’s a great opportunity for me to show store owners and their representatives all about what I do, and give them a brief overview of how to do it. I have 30 minutes to talk – and enough to say to fill up about 3 hours! A few lucky people will be able to walk away with a ready made sample – a couple from my Jewels in Chocolate CD, a couple from my new Hearts CD.

Saturday and Sunday you will find me in the Brewer booth with demos at 11am and 5pm on Saturday, and noon on Sunday.

If you’re there I’d love to meet you!

Now it’s time for boarding. More from Houston later!

This summer has been my time to fall in love with silk! It has also been my time to fall in love with using cotton thread for embroidered applique, specifically Aurifil Cotton Mako. This is not a “normal” choice for embroidery, so up until now, there has not been a thread chart available for it in the Bernina Embroidery Software. Now there is!

To download the new thread chart for Aurifil Cotton Mako, please enter your name and email address here:

You will receive an email with a link to the download page for the file, along with instructions on where to put it.

Thanks to Alex Veronelli from Aurifil for helping to create this thread chart!

Samples of Embroidered Applique using Aurifil Cotton Mako

Monday August 31, 2009 at 7:40am saw me sitting on  a plane leaving  Phoenix, AZ and flying to Cleveland, OH. Why? To tape a 10 minute segment for Quilting Arts TV!

The last few weeks have been spent preparing for this major life event. I’ve never been on TV before, and despite watching shows from the previous series, I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into!

My brief – to demonstrate how to do embroidered applique. The best bit – I got to do it on one of the new Bernina 830 embroidery machines using the ever so large Jumbo hoop.

My plane landed at Cleveland Hopkins airport on time at about 20 minutes past 2pm. Down to the baggage claim to see my suitcase full of quilts sitting waiting for me. What a relief!

Since it hadn’t occurred to me until about 9pm on Sunday that I would need to find a way to get myself from the airport to the studio, and the shuttle was fully booked, I found myself taking a taxi – which turned out to be cheaper!

4pm found me arriving at the Beachwood Studio, met at the front door by Katherine Lamancusa, assistant to the producer and person to turn to if you needed just about anything. Then into the Green Room – which really is very green!

Close to the end of the day, everyone there had already done their thing, so the atmosphere was cheerful and relaxed. Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero was a familiar face, and also rushing out the door so not much time to do anything other than say “Hi! Bye!”. It did mean that she freed up a table, so I got to empty all my stuff out and start to get organized. That’s my green suitcase in the center of the pic, with my table in the back right hand corner.

Jeanne Delpit from Bernina USA was also a familiar face and voice, and had a friendly hug to welcome me. Getting busy turned out to be a really good thing, so after unpacking I turned my attention to preparing fabric for the project I was going to demo on TV.

I had decided to use the designs from my newest embroidered applique collection, the Hearts CD, stitched out on Silk Dupioni with Aurifil Cotton Mako 50 weight thread.

I hadn’t decided what colors I was going to use, but finally chose  turquoise silk for the background, pink silk for the heart, with lime green, turquoise, orange and magenta for the thread.

Everything was finally cut, stabilized and ready! Time to stitch out a complete heart so that it would be “finished” and waiting in the jumbo hoop, for the end of my demonstration.

Pokey Bolton, the host of Quilting Arts TV was finally done with her part of filming for the day, and was also busy in the Green Room, working on a project. And borrowing my rotary cutter!

Everything finally finished and ready, time to go to the hotel. Teri Harris Lucas was also there a day early, and she had a car, and she was staying in the same hotel! So off we went together, enjoying a quiet dinner together at PF Chang’s across the street from the hotel.

Tuesday morning at 8am saw me in makeup getting ready to go on TV! I was the first guest of the day, but Pokey had been hard at work already, taping all the intros and exits for the series. She wears a different outfit for each show, so it seemed like she was back in the Green room every few minutes for a change of clothes.

And then it was my turn!

First to get the Bernina 830 onto the set. Jeanne took the sewing machine, Katherine was in charge of the embroidery module. It really is a big machine – especially when you have to move it!

Have you ever noticed that the people who are usually behind the camera don’t like to have their photo taken? Ray was the camera guy filming to the right of the set – at least from my perspective of being on the set! Billy is the floor director, equally shy when it came to having his photo taken!

Jeanne set up the 830 while Katherine helped me to bring all of my “stuff” onto the set. Where to put everything was the big question of the moment! I’m very glad that I had way too much stuff to show off. A lot of it didn’t appear – but Kathie Stull, the producer, helped us to choose the things that would show off best.

I was surprised how dark the rest of the studio is, and also how quiet! I think there were two camera guys, Ray off to the right of the set, and another guy straight in front doing all the closeups – from above! Billy, the floor director, was off to the left with a monitor to show what was being filmed. I think there was someone lurking at the back of the room, but have no idea what they were doing. A sound guy appeared a couple of times – first to get me hooked up with a mic, and then after we started filming to adjust the sound so that I could be heard!

Pokey was wonderful – very cool, calm and collected! Always there with the perfect question to move the demo along. All in all, this was about the fastest 10 minutes I have ever experienced – apart from the eternity it took for the machine to stitch out the placement line for the heart. Was it enough to give people a good view of what I do? Time will tell! Given that I have a lot to say about how to do embroidered applique, I don’t think I’ve ever been so tongue-tied before. Maybe there will be a next time – in which case now I know what to do – and it wasn’t quite so scary after all!

All classes were lots of fun, with lots of happy students! The Dudes filled their classroom to capacity for Quilted All Over and had one student who was unable to make it in. No Hands Piped Binding this afternoon had my first Mother/Son duo taking a class together.

I got to the gym twice this week – and would have made it a third time on Saturday morning, except a friend called just as we were about to leave and suggested a playdate at the train park (the McCormick Stillman Railroad Park in Scottsdale, AZ). We decided to take advantage of the cool after the previous night’s storm to go and play – although it did get a little steamy later in the morning!

One more week to go before heading out to Cleveland on August 31 to tape a 10 minute segment for Quilting Arts TV on September 1. And so much still to be done!

The quilting on the Hearts quilt is finished – it’s now just waiting to be bound. Pam and I were able to stitch out all 6 of the small hearts and 2 each of the 6 medium sized hearts in a very productive day on Tuesday. So this week there is a lot of finishing to do, as well as quilting the Jewels in Silk quilt.

Classes coming up this week are part 2 for both Digitizing for Beginners at Sew from the Heart on Wednesday, and Quilted All Over (peacock feathers) at 3 Dudes Quilting on Thursday. Wednesday evening I get to go to Sew from the Heart for the second time that day to give all the staff an overview of what version 6 of the Bernina Embroidery Software has in store.

And not to be forgotten – I need to write the directions for the project I will be presenting on Quilting Arts TV!

I confess to being a little mystified by the new Morphing Effect tool in the new version 6 of the Bernina Embroidery Software. It can create some wonderful effects, but so far I have not come to any conclusions about when and how I will use it. So I went back to basics with a circle and a square, and a simple lacework fill, to take another look at what it can do. Here are the results:

Above are the results of applying the Morphing Effect to a 2″ diameter circle filled with the lacework fill (default settings) and outlined with satin stitch, stitch width = 0.06″. Below see the results for a square with the same fill and outline.

Top row: Pinch, Ripple, Skew Horizontal, Wave Horizontal.

Bottom row: Punch, Twirl, Skew Vertical, Wave Vertical.

There are definitely possibilities to be explored!

New in v6 of the Bernina Embroidery Software: to copy and paste, right click on the object you want to copy and drag it to a new location. Releast the click and there is your new embroidery object.

Quick and easy.

So starting with what can we do with the Morphing Effect tool?

When using the Morphing Effect, there is a recommendation to increase stitch spacing by about 20%. The default stitch spacing is usually 0.40mm, so an increase of 20% gives you a new stitch spacing of 0.48mm.

There are 8 different morphing effects, which can be used individually, or more than one can be applied to an object. For all, select the object or objects that you wish to morph. And then click on the desired effect in the Morphing Effect panel.

The real subject of this post is all about the new Morphing Effect tool. But you have to start out with something to morph, so in preparation for morphing, let’s check out the new Art Canvas and create a star.

Picture View is no more! It has been replaced by the Art Canvas. Art Canvas is no longer “just” a place to import a picture. It is a fully functioned vector editing tool – using CorelDraw Essentials 4.

Creating a star is easy! Click on the Star tool. Click and drag to create a star. Holding down the Ctrl key while clicking and dragging will create a symmetrical star. Holding down the Shift key while clicking and dragging will create a star that expands from the center. Holding down both Ctrl + Shift while clicking and dragging will create a symmetrical star that expands from the center.

Select the star and you can change the number of points. You can also change the sharpness of the points – to make them short and fat or long and slim.

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Having created some shapes, you can now select one or all of them and “Convert to Embroidery” at the touch of a button! A simple outlined shape will create the same shape as an embroidery object, with a single running stitch outline.

A shape with a thicker outline and a fill will create an embroidery object with a thicker outline and a fill!

And now we are ready for Morphing Effect!

New in version 6 of the Bernina Embroidery Software: to zoom out (to make more of your embroidery fit on the screen), press F10!

Quick and easy!

Artistic View Toggle

Bernina Embroidery Software v5 has a tab for Design View and a tab for Artistic view. Most of the editing takes place in Design View. But if you want to see what the embroidery is “really” going to look like, you have to switch over to Artistic View.

Bernina Embroidery Software v6 has an Embroidery Canvas. No more switching between tabs. Simply press “T” to toggle from one view to the other. You can edit in either view!

Quick and easy.