Sewing Machine Basics

Picking up the threads: Marlene Answer-Lewis of Redgate Quilting. Picture: Zoe ...

SARAH HUDSON meets a quilter who knows about the consuming pain and the passion

Only a quilter can truly appreciate the agony and ecstasy of their craft.

Marlene Answer-Lewis knows this only too well.

"Quilting consumes you," laughs Marlene from her home in the North East Victorian town of Alexandra.

"You want to keep going but after a few hours at a domestic sewing machine making something like a queen quilt - where the throat space between needle and machine is about four inches (10cm) - you ache all over, the neck, the back. You can hardly move your hands.

"But you still keep on going."

Marlene suffered so much for her craft that instead of choosing another, she invested an astonishing $24,000 in a 12ft (3.6m) American longarm professional quilting system, the Rolls-Royce of quilting machines, boasting a throat space of 30 inches (76cm).

"It was so big we had to put the rollers for it through the windows and re-arrange rooms of the house," Marlene says.

That was back in 2004.

Since then, not only has she been pain-free, she has also created a thriving quilting business, Redgate Quilting, which offers relief to frustrated fellow quilters.

Quilters bring their tops - of various patterns - and their backing piece for Marlene to compile and finish, with a choice of basic edge-to-edge designs, or the more sophisticated custom quilting such as stitch in the ditch and McTavishing.

"There are quilters out there called toppers, who have a cupboard full of quilts not finished because it's too hard," she says.

"They make the top and the backing but don't put them together. Instead they bring it to a longarmer like me.

"In the US there's lots of longarmers. But there's not a lot of us in Australia."

Marlene has lived in Alexandra for 22 years, after growing up on dairy farms around Gippsland, where she always sewed, crocheted and knitted, under the tutelage of her mother, and later worked as a seamstress at a commercial T-shirt factory.

She says her business is so-named because Alexandra was originally known as Redgate, or Red Gate Diggings.

Marlene produces about seven quilts a week and she prefers to keep it at a moderate pace.

Marlene can't ever imagine returning to a domestic sewing machine.

"You have no idea how awful it is. People do it but I don't know how they do it.

Sewing 101: Monogramming Basics & Buying Guide - Sew4Home

The use of the monogram can be traced back to Roman and Greek times when it was used as a royal signature or seal, as well as on coins to identify a particular ruler. In the Middle Ages, printers, potters and other artisans used renderings of their initials to mark their work. But it's their use in Victorian times that we are most familiar with, when a monogram was a symbol of aristocracy. Upper class families thought it crucial to mark their table linens, cutlery, and other household goods with their monogram as a sign of prestige. We chose to use a monogram as a feature embellishment on two of our eight Citron-Gray Nursery projects: the crib bumpers, posting tomorrow and the baby quilt, posting on August 15th.

Single initial and double initial monograms are both completely acceptable these days, but the traditional three-initial monogram is still the standard and dates from the Victorian era. The initial of your first name goes on the left, the initial of your middle name on the right, and the initial of your last name is large and in charge in the middle. Our Citron-Gray Nursery M-F-M monogram stands for Michael Miller Fabrics , sponsors of the Citron-Gray Nursery Series!

Originally, this pattern was considered a female's monogram, with the male version consisting of same-size letters in a row: first, middle, last. Married monograms usually have the bride's first initial on the left, the groom's first initial on the right, and the joint last name initial in the center. A married woman sometimes opts to use her first name initial on the left, her maiden name initial on the right, and her new last name initial in the center. Today, the monogram is no longer the domain of the elite class, and all rules go out the window. A monogram can be traditional, whimsical, understated or flamboyant.

For those looking to bring this level of personalization to their home décor, the perfect monogram may be no further than the push of a sewing machine button.

You CAN monogram by hand, but unless you have way more time than most, you'll be much better off monogramming with a embroidery machine.

Today's home embroidery machines allow you to create your own monogram, right on the machine. Most machines have a selection of monogram layouts and fonts built right into the machine.

One interesting side detail to note is the distinction between the ‘monogram' and the ‘cipher'. Strictly speaking, most home embroidery machines create a cipher, which is the creation of two or more letters where each part of the letter remains distinct from the other(s). A monogram combines the letters in such a way that the parts of the letters are combined and the overall design cannot be separated. (We include this detail for your future success as a Jeopardy contestant.

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