Did you catch our August 2021 Quilted Joy Clubhouse online meeting? 2021 is our year of grid designs! This month we're looking at how to machine quilt clamshells. If you missed the livestream it’s available to watch (or re-watch!) whenever you’d like. Find it on the Quilted Joy Youtube channel or on the Quilted Joy Clubhouse page on our website!

Our main program for this month’s meeting was how to machine quilt clamshells. Clamshells are a traditional quilting design that you'll find in both machine and hand quilting. Watch the video below to see Angela quilt clamshells, and so much more!

How to Machine Quilt Clamshells

Let's take a look at a super traditional grid-based quilting design - the clamshell! Clamshells have been around for years and years and have deep roots in the hand quilting world. Clamshells easily move into the machine quilting world, and it's a design I like to have fun with!

At their core, clamshells are just arcs that span across the width of two sections of your grid. To quilt the clamshells, you'll want to grab your favorite circle and straight edge rulers - I like the ProCircle and ProMini rulers by Quilter's Groove. I always start at the bottom of my grid and work my way up. Using my ProCircle ruler, I line up the center reference lines with the bottom of the grid and quilt a half circle across two squares of my grid. When you're at the edge of your grid, grab your straight edge ruler and move up to the next row. Be sure to watch the video above to see how I travel through the grid.

In your quilting, you can use just the clamshell shape, or if that's too simple there are loads of ways to dress them! In the video above we added cat whiskers to either side of the clamshell. Be sure to join me for the September 2021 Quilted Joy Clubhouse meeting to see even more ideas for how to personalize your clamshells!

Looky Loo Tour with Janet

Janet Selnes of Wisconsin was kind enough to give us a tour of her sewing and quilting studio! She set up her sewing machine, accessories, and APQS Lucey on a 12 foot table in a spare bedroom in her home. Her APQS Lucey fits perfectly along the length of her room. And we didn't talk about it, but I love the big floor lamp she set behind the table to really light up her quilting space! Thanks again Janet for letting us take a peek into your sewing room!

New Arrivals at Quilted Joy - Low Shank Rulers!

Machine quilting rulers can be a game changer for your quilting abilities! There are so many incredible designs that a ruler can make possible or easier. For stand up longarm quilting, it's super important to only use 1/4" thick acrylic rulers with your ruler quilting foot (on APQS longarm machines, the ruler foot is the foot that comes with your machine). The ruler foot paired with the thicker ruler will prevent you from accidentally sliding your ruler under your needle while quilting. And trust me, you don't want your needle hitting that ruler. It's not a fun sound or feeling!

Some sit down sewing machines aren't designed to have a traditional 1/4" high ruler quilting foot. Instead, they have what's called a low shank ruler foot. If you have one of these machines, you'll only want to use low shank rulers. And here at Quilted Joy, we're now offering a selection of low shank quilting rulers!

Currently we have the low shank rulers designed by Angela Walters and Creative Grids. These rulers will help you quilt a variety of specialty designs. The Shelly Low Shank ruler can be used to quilt clamshells just like we quilted earlier in the meeting. Or the Elvira Low Shank ruler is great for quilting two inch continuous curves like we learned in the January 2021 Quilted Joy Clubhouse meeting. These rulers are a lot of fun, and we're excited to see all the quilting designs our low shank quilters will come up with!

How Would You Quilt It? Joy's Patriotic Quilt

I think the How Would You Quilt It portion of our Quilted Joy Clubhouse meeting is probably the most popular among our Clubhouse members! This month we looked at how I might quilt Joy's quilt. I had fun creating a design that added more structure and negatives space to her quilt.

Would you have quilted this quilt differently? I'd love to hear your ideas too! Join us over in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse to share your own design ideas for the unquilted tops posted in the group!

Show and Tell

We love to wrap up the QJ Clubhouse meetings with a little show and tell. There are so many talented quilters in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse on Facebook and they share lots of amazing quilts. It’s fun to put a spotlight on their hard work!

The Quilted Joy Clubhouse live meetings occur on the first Wednesday of each month at 1pm Eastern. Our next Clubhouse meeting will be September 1, 2021 at 1pm Eastern/Noon Central and we’ll be continuing our clamshell quilting with more fun ways to dress them up. If you’d like to watch live, you can find us on Facebook in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse or subscribe to the Quilted Joy Youtube channel to be notified about our videos. Don’t worry if you can’t join us live. The video will remain available on both Facebook and Youtube afterwards so you can watch whenever you want!

Hope to “see” you at the next live meeting!