Hello everyone! Hope you’ve enjoyed your summer and have found some time to keep on track of your quilting projects. With the heat waves that we have had, I have been keeping cool indoors with my fantastic Pfaff Creative Icon and I must admit that it has changed my perspective on quilting and vacationing.

So this week it’s all about quilting projects using the embroidery tray and a few other tricks along the way to help you have a nice clean finish.

To start off, let’s go back to my April posts featuring a baby quilt featuring the lovely Sleepy Sloth fabrics from Northcott. All that was left was to quilt some hearts in the main blocks. I had my design in mind but I fell in love with the heart border design that was already programmed into the creative icon. So I decided that could be an easy introduction to the embroidery.

I finally mustered up the courage to open the lovely PFAFF Embroidery Carrying Case that protects the embroidery unit with all the hoops. It’s all very well secured and It made me realize that I could easily travel with the case should I need to bring it up to the cottage.

Due to the thickness of the quilt, I had to work my quilt onto the hoop. I was able to unscrew the clip of the hoop to ensure that it fits into it no problem.

So the trick is to position the first hoop with the hook underneath your quilt, ensuring that the hook is located on the bottom right.

Position the quilt and add the second hoop.

Ensure that you see the writing so that you know it’s in the correct position. Then clip to close. I used the biggest size hoop which allowed me to embroider up to 13.11″ x 13.78″. I duplicated the design 4 times and aligned it perfectly to my block. It really does help to have the biggest screen possible on the machine. I was able to play with the precision positioning on the screen to ensure that the embroidery would fall exactly where I wanted on the quilt.

I found it easy to embroider using the single hole plate and the 6D embroidery foot. When the straight stitch plate is attached, the machine automatically sets to straight stitch mode, preventing damage to the needle and plate. The large workspace really helped out as I was positioning the hoop in the middle of the quilt and had at least 10″ of the quilt hanging out on the right hand side.

I also picked up some Sulky rayon 40wt thread in the midnight blue color to ensure that the thread wouldn’t break while embroidering. I love the look it gives to my quilt. It blends well with all the rest of my quilting made with my Blue Heaven blendable 12wt 100% cotton Sulky thread. Another thing I learned while making this project was that the bobbins on the creative icon are 30% larger! I kept on wondering when I would run out of thread but I was able to embroider my three blocks without having to make a new bobbin!

The first main block took no more than 20 minutes to figure out and embroider. The other 2 blocks, on the left side, gave me a bit of a workout as I decided to reduce the size of the hearts and make several more duplicates to cover the complete area. And the good news is that I was able to save both block quilting designs: I simply had to touch the heart on the bottom left of my screen for the creative icon to save the embroidery design. I gave each a distinctive name so that I can simply go into my sewnet and touch the cloud to retrieve the design should I want to use it again on another block.

As this is my first quilt made using an embroidery system, I have to say that I’m really thrilled. It was a great project to do while on vacation. And I couldn’t have made it without the PFAFF creative icon. Tomorrow I’ll show you how I cheated to make a quick and cute binding.