Piecing a Quilt Top Today -- Hooray

Today I "hung out" in the office of LiTenUp Technologies, a company owned by my friends Carol, Shelley and David. LiTenUp manufactures the Quilters Cruise Control as well as the Qbot, which is a computerized quilting system for people who machine quilt on a frame. I got caught up with all the new things they are doing and saw the new pre-cut quilt kits that they design, laser cut and sell under the name 3 Crazy Ladies.



At the end of my last post, I showed a cute picture of Carol's grandson, Steven. Above is the quilt he pieced -- now, let's keep in mind that he just turned 6 years old less than two weeks ago, so he pieced this when he was 5! Carol told me a story about Steven: A little girl came to visit the house and his mom suggested to Steven that maybe she would like to sew or do crafts. Steven said "No, I don't think she would like that -- she's a girl!"

The picture of Steven's quilt was taken on the frame where it is smoothed down onto the batting and ready to be quilted by the Qbot. To find out more information about this quilting system, you can click here to go to their website. There are videos, webinars and all sorts of information on the website -- most of them done by Denise Applegate, who is the resident answer person. In fact, somewhere around the office is a large banner that says "ASK DENISE!"



I looked over the piecing in Steven's quilt and had to take a picture to show you that yes, those corners match! The pieces are all laser cut and Steven just matched up the notches and guided the squares through the machine.

This is Steven's block in a quilt that was made by the children in his classroom and auctioned off to raise funds for his school. Each child made a block, the quilt was pieced by Shelley and some other moms and David quilted it using the Qbot.

Here's a close-up of the border quilting....

Not to be outdone by a 5 year old, I sat down with one of the kits and started matching up notches and sewing. After I pinned every section and did quite a bit of sewing, Carol told me that with the laser cut notches, I didn't need to do any of that pinning. It was one of those "Now you tell me!" moments....

I did manage to take over a whole desktop and computer station, covering it with my blocks....

It just sort of got messier as the day progressed -- now that I know I don't have to use pins, it should go much faster tomorrow!