Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Tied Quilts - Can They Be Quilted?

Tied Quilts - Can They Be Quilted?


Example of a quilt that has been tied.
Most of the time YES. Most of the time,  it is a T-Shirt quilt that was commissioned  by a non-professional. They did not know what they were doing.  Because we have a 'soft spot' for T-Shirt quilts, we offer a special rate for quilting these type of quilts. If you use the Crazy Puzzle pattern- scaled to fit your quilt, we offer a special discounted rate over our usual rates.  And no, we are not prejudiced because you tried to do it yourself.

As one of the premier 't-shirt quilt' creators in the country, we get a lot of projects where we 'fix' quilts that were done by the non-professionals or well-intentioned family or friends.  Because these folks do not have the equipment that quilting professionals use, they end up working on a project that is beyond their capabilities.

What We Offer

We do ask to see the quilt in person or photos via email to evaluate whether we can help you with your project. In most cases, the results have been awesome and the owners have been thrilled with the results.


Example where we fixed quilting
by non-professional.
Depending on what the original 'quilter' used to tie the quilts, there might be holes in the fabric that might not be acceptable to the owner. I have fixed quilts that were 'tied' with yarn. This can leave a larger hole in the quilt, that might not go away with the usual ironing or squirt of water. However, usually the holes disappear with the first laundry or a few shots of steam from an iron.

In some cases, there is a bit of 'fullness' that results from the their original quilt. In this case there we might not be able to 'quilt it out'.

If you have a tied quilt that you would like to have quilted, please contact us to discuss it. We had one quilt that came in, that only had 4 ties in the entire quilt, others a tie every couple of inches.  These are the easy ones to fix.

In some cases, the crafter tried to quilt the quilt themselves. In many cases we 'CAN' fix it.  The images show where they tried to quilt 'in the ditch' .  In this case we did not take out the quilting, just loaded it on the longarm machine and added our own quilting.  See the straight lines of quilting?  That was the original quilting.

Transforming Your Tied Quilt

  • Do not remove the ties first. We will do that as each row is ready to be quilted. It may be that all ties are removed before quilting, and we will get a better result from removing the ties before loading the quilt on the machine.
  • Go ahead and remove one tie to determine if the resulting hole is acceptable to you - or not.
  • If repairs need to be made to an older quilt, you should take care of this prior to sending it to be quilted.
  • We can do minor repairs (such as popped seams), but do not count on us doing any major repairs.
  • If a quilt is old and fragile, we reserve the right to not do any machine quilting.
For the most part, we are only doing edge to edge (E2E) or 'panto' style quilting.  Custom quilting takes a lot of time, and in order to accommodate everyone, we have to limit the amount of 'custom' quilting that we accept.

We do have a minimum charge of $50 to do 'anything' to your quilt. This does not apply to batting, backing or binding.  We do not charge a set-up charge, thread charge or other random fees for items that are required to quilt your quilt. (such as a thread charge. Good grief. How can you quilt a quilt without thread or loading the quilt on the machine???)



Thursday, November 19, 2015

T-Shirt Quilt Gift Certificates for The Holidays

Oh no!  You just now figured out that giving a T-Shirt Quilt for Christmas is the best idea you ever had!  Oh wait...  Christmas is just a little over a month away.  Yeah really.  5 weeks.  In the best of times, it takes five weeks to create your special t-shirt quilt.  What to do?

Give a T-Shirt Quilt
Gift Certificate for Christmas
Give a gift certificate.  This way it will be a surprise - AND the best part is that you don't have to figure out what t-shirts you should use.  Most of the time Mom is in the kids closet trying to figure out what t-shirts mean the most to their child.   Or, hubby knowing this will be the best gift ever, does not have a clue how to get started.  Last year, a husband bought a gift certificate thinking that his wife would get the standard 12 block generous throw quilt.   Instead,  she dug out a big box of baby clothes and !had a quilt made from all of the clothes from when the child was newborn to toddler.

Christmas is just a few weeks away.  You can order your Gift Certificate clear up to Christmas Eve and we will email you a  personalized PDF file that you can print out and put under the tree!    What could be easier?

If you are not sure about a t-shirt quilt.  No worries.  We have several quilts already made that you might consider as a gift for that special person.  Just let us know what you are looking for and we will help you find something.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

2015 Quilt Festival Wrap-Up

The largest convention in Houston each year is the  Houston Quilt Festival.  Quilt Mecca.  That is what the locals call the last 10 days of October each year.  I moved to Texas over 10 years ago, and have been attending Market and Festival every year since then.  What is it?

Well, Market  is a credentialed trade show, not open to the general public.    This is a whole different animal and is for quilt shops, book writers, pattern designers, longarm quilters  and other quilting professionals.  While there are several quilt displays, this is just the preamble to Quilt FESTIVAL.

Aaahhh, Quilt Festival.    This is the best of the best.    I remember my first Quilt Festival in 2003 (the first weekend that we had moved to Houston, the moving truck had not even arrived yet).  I went by myself.  Who cares that I  would not know anyone.    I went up and down the rows of quilts, my mouth hanging open.   Oh my,  the next row, how could it be more awesome than the last row...  I was in awe.    THEN, I discovered the vendors.  OMG...  Quilt shops from all over the country in one place.  Fortunately, my birthday is the same weekend.  I called hubby and told him not to worry about any birthday presents.... I had it covered....

Anyway, update to 2015.  My sister-in-law is visiting from out of town, and we are both taking classes.   This year we are commuting from Cypress to downtown Houston (about 30 miles) each day and learning about HOV lanes and Houston construction.    No worries.  We make it to our 8 am classes each morning.  Note to self -  next year bring DOWN JACKETS as classrooms are freezing.  Oh wait.. folks in Houston don't HAVE down jackets as it does not get that cold here!

Friday, November 06, 2015

70 Uses For Leftover Batting

What to do With Leftover Quilt Batting

As a longarm quilter I have PILES and PILES of leftover batting scraps. I have lots of uses for these leftover scraps, but here are some other suggestions that I have collected over the years. Some may be similar, but that is OK. Since we first posted this about ten years ago, we have had many suggestions for additional uses for batting scraps. New items added to the end of the list, and some of existing suggestions have been updated.


1. Rough cut a 9 x 12 rectangle to use in your Swiffer - bonus, you can turn it over and use the other side too!

2. Cut into 5" squares to use to make coasters

3. I use small odd shaped pieces to dust with.

4 . Use small piece of batting at your sewing table to collect loose threads ( I keep a stack of randomly cut rectangles at the end of my longarm table to collect thread scraps).

5. have another one at the ironing station to collect threads that you trim off while ironing