Toys from the Quilt Festival: Volume 3

I came back from the quilt festival with three new toys directly related to free motion quilting.

The first is this:

These babies are called The Fabulous Fabric Glide and are made by The Gypsy Quilter.  The idea is that you put this around the area you are quilting and it helps you guide the fabric.  It gives you a larger area to work in that the span of your hands (or my hands, anyway).  I think it will help to give a more even density to my free motion quilting since I can fill one area this size, then move the guide and go on to the next area of the same size.

Next I came home with this:

This is called a skill builder.  It's made by RGA Design and the purpose is to improve your confidence and skill at machine quilting.  It's one yard of fabric with a variety of quilting patterns printed on it.  You make a sandwich out of it and then practice quilting the designs.  You can see that I've already played with it some along with my other FMQ toys.  When I went onto their website to add a link I discovered some things that I didn't know.  First of all, there are several levels of difficulty of these skill builders.  Fortunately the one I bought is the first level!  I had a few "frugal pangs" at using good batting and backing fabric to just practice and play, but on the website were some nice suggestions to tame the frugal monster inside of me.  First was the idea that you could stitch several times over the same pattern using different thread colors to get more practice.  And then second, if you use a colorful print as a backing you can turn it into a tote (directions on the website) with the skill builder fabric on the inside.

And last but certainly not least, my sweet husband bought me a Trustitch for my new machine as an early birthday present.  This is Baby Lock's answer to the Bernina stitch regulator.

Several months ago when I was researching a new machine one of the things I was interested in was Bernina's stitch regulator.  I tried it out pretty extensively in the store but decided against it and ended up getting a Baby Lock Elegante.  This was my first opportunity to try the Baby Lock Trustitch.  It just came out a few months ago and  works on a wireless signal.  That round thing in the front attaches by a magnet (the black knob is the magnet) to your quilt sandwich and sends messages to the box about how fast the fabric is being moved.  The box is attached to the sewing machine and adjusts the stitching accordingly.  To me this system worls much better than the Bernina system.  I thought it really DID make a difference in the quality of the stitching.  So, it lives at my house now and I'm anxious to quilt something up using free motion!