SPACE QUILT - part 1

The next project to tackle on the Q24 was a baby quilt I had made for my great-nephew.  It is a space quilt, and even glows in the dark!  The quilt presented a couple of problems I wanted to solve.  First was the squares.  I wanted to quilt these with sort of overlocking footballs.  I thought they looked like a space-agey radar signal.  They took 4 passes in sort of half-circles.

 The problem was that I wanted a fairly consistent curve.  If I could use a hopping foot and a thick ruler with a curve, this would have been fairly straight forward.  But so far, the Q24 does not have that option, (I am told now it will be out in early March).  So what to do instead.  I knew from experience on my Bernina frame, trying to use a ruler with a normal foot is not a good option.  The foot tends to jump the edge of the ruler, and this will break the needle, and you might kill the timing.  Not what I was willing to chance on the Q24.  So instead, I cut my desired curve out of card stock.  I could lay this on, hold it with one hand and guide the machine along the edge with the other.  If the needle accidentally hit the card stock - no big deal, it would pierce it. This worked - to a point.  I discovered I drive much smoother with both hands.  So I ended up using my template for the first couple of curves in each pass, and then free handing it.  It certainly did not have the consistency and smoothness I would have wanted, but it will do. I also realized I needed to be very mindful of intersections.  I would start thinking of the next corner before I had gotten to the one I was going towards.  That's when I would miss hitting the corner.  I had to keep my focus on where the machine was going right now.  That seems obvious in type, but harder to do in reality.  THink of the present, not the future!

 I found that with each direction of the curve I wanted to switch which hand was holding the template, and which was guiding the machine.  One of the great things about the Q24 is that there are four buttons on the handles that you can program to do what you need it to do.  All you do is touch the control screen to set the buttons. So I put a start/stop button on each handle, and that made it easy to control from either hand.  It helps that I am fairly ambidextrous!