Product Review: Supreme Slider

I love to free motion quilt.  Once I got over the bump of learning how it all works and getting my sea legs when it came to how to control the machine, my speed and forming the shapes, I became addicted.  I know that for a lot of folks it seems intimidating or too fussy to do at home, but I get a lot of joy out of it. 

That being said, there are a lot of gizmos and gadgets in the market targeted to quilters to make free motion quilting easier - there are clips and gloves and ointments and brackets and the list goes on.  You know me...the apple doesn't fall far from the gizmo-hating tree.  I was brought up by a gizmo hating quilter, so I too am a gizmo hating quilter. 

A while back one of our quilting buddies told us about a free motion quilting class she took in which the teacher had the Supreme Slider by Pat LaPierre on the list as a recommended supply.  She absolutely raved about how wonderful it was, and considering who was doing the raving, I conceded to giving it a try. 

So it came in this little folded pack, and it is just an 8.5" x 11" piece of slick teflon-esque material with a sticky bottom side that adheres to your machine like so:

It's not too difficult to get on there, but it does want to stick before you're ready for it to, so it takes a little finagling.  But one it's on, so long as your feed dogs are dropped and the hole is centered over the hole on your machine's throat plate, you're ready to rock.  

I should have taken a picture of the project I was quilting while I was using this thing, but to he honest, I didn't think about it. Oops!  But the Supreme Slider is WONDERFUL.  It really does reduce the friction like it claims to, and it is quite noticeable.  With my machine, there is an issue where, in heavily quilted areas, the threads want to catch on the open feed dog area.  I have NO idea why this happens, since the threads aren't loose, but it does.  Using the Supreme Slider seems to eliminate the issue in addition to eliminating the drag.  And, even though the backside gets linty after a while, it is very easy to clean and reuse.  For a gizmo...this thing is pretty sweet.

So what would I say are the pros and cons?

CONS

- If you have top loading bobbin case as I do, it's a pain to change the bobbin when it runs out.  If you aren't cautious to thread the bobbin thread up through the mat, it will get stuck on the sticky side and cause real issues if you don't notice and go to start sewing again. 

- For a one trick pony, it's spendy.  I had the advantage of being able to buy it wholesale, but it retails for just shy of $30.  

- Keep the packaging!  It doesn't come with anything to protect the sticky side from getting linty or dusty while you're not using it, other than the packaging it came in. 

PROS

- It really, really does reduce drag.

- It fits your machine even if you have an extension table.  My extension table likes to move while I'm quilting, and this helps keep that sucker from shifting.

- It is reusable.  I was able to get three quilts done before it was linty enough to affect its ability to adhere to my machine. 

- Speaking of washing, just some warm water and hand soap is all it takes to get the lint off.  Washing it with warm soapy water did not reduce its stickiness.

All in all, I give the Supreme Slider 4 out of 5 stars.  The cost and the bobbin issue are both enough to knock it out of 5 star status. 

You can find the Supreme Slider online here directly from the website. 

Stash Sunday: Here There be Dragons!

Linking up with Molli Sparkles for Stash Sunday.

I found this neat piece this past weekend.  It's from the line Medieval Times by Timeless Treasures.  I got the last yard and change...victory is mine!

Because dragons are cool, duh!

A couple years ago I fell in love with and bought the book Spellbinding Quilts by Maaike Bakker

...and I haven't done a single thing from it.  I think this fabric would look awesome paired up with some blocks from this book.

One of these days! 

Audrey Hepburn Quilt

I never get to pull the wool over my little brother's eyes.  The kid is untrickable, usually.  But for the first time in (at the time) 24 years I managed to pull one over on him.

I got him to pick his own fabric for his Christmas quilt under the ruse that it was for a shop sample.  Shabam!  I know, I know...that tactic will never work on him again, especially now that I've posted it on my blog to live forever on the internet!

Myke is a HUGE movie buff, and he really loves movies from the 30s-60s, most of which I honestly haven't heard of.  But he is an Audrey Hepburn fan, and so am I, and he had picked this panel of Audrey Hepburn's movie posters to be carried in the shop.  He picked the accompanying prints and off I went sewing.

Despite the sleepy Christmas morning look on his face, he liked the quilt!

HEXIE MADNESS

When I got my temp position at the VA, it became quickly evident that an hour lunch was a lot of down time that I needed to fill.  [At the time] I didn't know a soul there, so social lunches were pretty out of the question.  I cannot just sit there like a stupid lump - I am always doing at least SOMETHING, and Netflix alone just wasn't cutting it.

So I hopped on the bandwagon and gave English Paper Piecing (EPP) a go...nevermind the fact that I hate handwork.  I have tons of scraps, some time to kill...I am using the 1" hexagon cardstock templates that come precut, 100 to a pack.  

Let's just say 6 months and almost 600 hexies later, I am an addict.  EPP is actually quite fun and instantly gratifying. I don't have a finished project yet because honestly, I only do this on my lunch breaks...now that I have a new job on the books, we'll see how the rest pans out.  But I have just been grabbing scraps and putting them together at random.  Some of the pieces match, some don't, I'm ignoring directionality (which is HARD for me to do) and so far, it's just been a lot of fun. 

Here's a little snapshot of some of the pieces....there are MANY more and I do have a 2'-3' piece all put together - this picture was taken a few months ago.  

I've started to assemble the flower shapes

Let the assembly begin!

And naturally....no picture can be taken without Toki's say so.

Thanks, Toki.  

Woodpecker Quilt

So...there's a story here.  When my folks lived in their first house here in town, it was a two story house with wood siding.  On the side of the house where their bedroom was, there were a bunch of trees really close by - several feet, tops.  So there were a bunch of woodpeckers that would go into those trees, and a few of them decided to become the bane of Dad's existence and start pecking on the wood siding.  While I still lived at home, I lived downstairs and I remember hearing Dad wheeling out from his office, walking into the bedroom and then he'd run downstairs with this Red Ryder BB gun.  His goal was to scare them off and he's pop off a few BBs and that would be that.  He'd go back upstairs, but not too much longer later they'd be tapping on the siding again.

The woodpeckers were Dad's Bumpus hounds.

So we got this Woodpecker fabric in and of course I had to make a quilt for him.  My folks recently moved to a different house, so the woodpeckers are a thing of the past, but they live on in quilted form.

I quilted it up on my Janome with a large scale, loose wood grain pattern.  I wish it showed up better here, but it looked pretty cool with the wool batting.
  

Cowgirl Quilt

So as most of you know I came into very sudden ownership of a lot of castoff pieces from Mom's stash...pieces she didn't think she'd ever use, or things she didn't like anymore or things that she had no idea she bought it to begin with.

Some of the pieces she gave me were cowgirl/cowboy themed.  For a while there she was all about the country western fabrics! But she said she'd never get to it, so away it went.

So I thought for Christmas it might be kind of neat to give her something made from her stash using one of her books and in a pattern she probably would have done.  So that's what I did.  Everything except the silver came from pieces of her stash that she'd given me.

This is the pattern I chose...I forgot which book it is from, but it's from an older one.

I thought Delectable Mountains would make a great western themed quilt.  It's a great quilt anyway!

It became quickly obvious that I needed to do a little tweaking of the pattern, because there were unnecessary Y Seams galore...why...why...WHY.  I mean sure, I did trrrrrryyyyy the Y Seams.

Eff this.

EFF OFF.

So I tweaked it to be put togethr on point not all Y seamy.  It went together MUCH smoother and a lot less glossed over swearing out of me. 

I quilted it all up on my trusty little Janome...

And, she loved it :-) 

Help! Help! I'm Being Repressed!

By now it should be obvious that my interests are...eclectic.  If not, then, well...my interests are eclectic.  One of my interests is medieval English history.  It is fascinating stuff.  And how lucky that someone else in the quilting world found it appealing somewhere too?  

A few years back Lizzie House designed a line that that medieval style serfs, kings, pendants and other middle agey stuff. 

 I wholly regret missing out on it, but as fortune would have it, mom was given a few sample charm packs of the line when it went out of print by one of our old reps.  Now when I say sample charm packs...I mean it.  There were very few pieces to each pack.  This quilt is made up of the two packs. 

I love the colors.  I wish I had more!  The border is from Tula Pink's line Fox Field.  Couldn't ask for a better match!  

If the entry title didn't make it plain enough, I've named this quilt, "Help! Help! I'm Being Repressed!"  It's not quilted yet, but I have a cool idea...I'm going to quilt it with the lines spoken by the serf in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, WHICH WILL NEVER GET OLD.  I leave you with this...the video is below the gif for you heathens who haven't seen the movie ;-) 

"You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!"

First for 2015...

So it took until March for me to get a post up.  Shame on me!

Truth be told I just haven't been in the blogging spirit.  I got swept up in getting laid off from my job, making most of this year's Christmas gifts for people, feeling down during the holidays (the first truly without my grandma, which was very noticeable), my temp job not going permanent like it was supposed to, trying to find a new job...stress, bullshit, excuses, blah blah blah.

The good news is, that I did find a new permanent job, so yay!  I'll still be away from the shop most of the time so, that sucks, but long term employment with bennies is a wonderful thing, so no complaints here.

So what have I been up to quilt-wise...pretty much samples all over the place.  I'm working in getting some posts up about those, but you know me, I'll get there eventually...