I was working on this quilt when a friend messaged me about her QCT5
My friend first asked about SAFE ZONES in QCT, and it takes a bit of wrapping your head around it. With normal quilting/long arm quilting, you have the top, then the batting which is a bit bigger, then the backing with is even bigger and long arm quilters prefer backings to be 6-8″ bigger than the tops so there’s room for pinning and clamps.
When you start QCT5 and want to work on pantos, it asks you to mark the safe zone. it’s NOT the size of the quilt, it’s as far left and toward the top you can go, so that’s often 4-6″ wider than the top, it really doesn’t matter how far left you go, I wouldn’t go OFF of the backing, but it’s more to tell the machine where the edge of the frame or clamps are on the edge of the fabric backing is.
then after you click the button it asks for bottom right of the safe zone and again it’s bigger than the top as far to the right and bottom as you can go, it’s NOT the finished size of the quilt, it’s just the area you have to work with.
I forgot to take a picture of how to then go in and change the design and size of the quilt, but it has nothing to do with safe area, you can see the safe area on the top of the screen here it shows 40.5″ x almost 15″ by quilt top was 16″ x 34″ but I like to add 2″ to each and tell QCT that’s the size of the quilt, so 18″ x 36″ which is still less than the safe area’s width.
with POWER panto in QCT5 it nests the rows nicely, you just change the size and spacing if you want it bigger and more or less space, then it looks like this on the screen, here it shows a partial row in the beginning and 2 rows, but you see the blue lines going across?
That’s because it wants to always go left to right on each row, but you can OPTIMIZE it and tell it to auto-reverse at the ends of the rows and also to connect that line as the end of one line doesn’t start at the same spot as the next row starts, it’s just a straight line usually off to the side (not always though)
Then it looks like this and the green dot is the starting point, the red is the ending point.
in the previous picture there was also a yellow dot at the top middle of the design, that you line up with about 1″ off onto the batting at the half way point of the quilt, so with my quilt it’s 17″ from each side and 1″ above it (you can often “wing” it as you and see something on the quilt block that shows the middle of the quilt)
Here I stitched the first set or Zone. See how it went over about 1″ on all the sides.
I forgot to say you always want to stitch down the edges- baste them, I don’t like the basting option on my machine so I just stitch it all the way around, you do that with each row when the quilt is forwarded. (and use a centering tape to make sure the top doesn’t shift)
Then you cut the thread and QCT tells you it will show where to line up the next zone, it automatically moves over to some point on the quilt by the bottom but it “should” be in the center again, I mark it with tape where I have a hole in the middle. Then the machine moves straight up near the top. THEN I forward the quilt on the frame and that tape moves too and I line it up with where the machine (the needle is) now that tape is at the top center and you click on the screen to show to show the next zone.
the zones always appear on top left of the screen, that’s why you have to tell the machine where the new starting point (yellow dot should be)
since my quilt is small, the extra space was 1 row plus a little bit so that didn’t fill the whole screen.
Then I finished quilting! My design was called “rebekah’s rose” UE
and the runner is a table runner version of my rolling boulders pattern
Hope this made sense a bit 😉
Current deals from Accuquilt: