Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I wrote these instructions for me, in case I ever have to do this again.

DISCLAIMER and NOTES:

• I’m not a HQ dealer or service person — just a user of their Sweet Sixteen quilting machine. So while these instructions suit ME and MY machine, if you follow them on your own machine, you do so AT YOUR OWN RISK.
• Only do this if you have explicit permission to do so from your dealer and/or Handi Quilter, as you may void your warranty.
• This is a FIDDLY procedure, so if you live reasonably close to your dealer, get your dealer to do this for you as they have all the specialist tools for the job, and will have experience in doing it. The only reason I did it myself was that it’s a 3+ hour round trip to my dealer.
• If you do it yourself, you may find it easier to access the relevant parts of the machine if you take it out of the table and CAREFULLY lay it down on its side or its back end. I did it with the machine in situ — i.e. in the table — and found it very awkward to get to all the places. Update: Another light ring went… This time I replaced it by lying the machine on its side with the left side uppermost. It was much easier to change out the light ring than doing it in situ. Further update: Here’s a photo of how my dealer does it — she lays the machine on its back:
  
• If your machine is still in its warranty period, you may find that the replacement light ring is at no cost. However, you may incur labour charges, depending on where you live.

You will need:

• a replacement Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen light ring (not available commercially, as far as I know — only available from your dealer or perhaps direct from HQ)
• one small Philips head screwdriver, preferably with a magnetised head (the screwdrivers that come in a small pack for computers/electronics are ideal)
• several types of tweezers; needle-nose tweezers (like surgical tweezers) are ideal
• about 15 to 30 minutes of spare time
• lots of patience and the ability to sit/squat on the floor for several minutes at a time and do things by touch (if you don’t take the machine out of the table)

First things first — this is what the original light ring looks like (front and back views); the red arrows indicate the screw holes and the green arrow shows the connector. (NOTE: As at May 2013, Handi Quilter source their light rings from a different manufacturer. These newer light rings look slightly different to the pictures below, but the screw holes, connector pieces, and these instructions remain the same.)

Front view of light ring

Back view of light ring

To swap out a faulty light ring with a new one (these instructions assume you’re changing the light ring with the machine in the table):

1. TURN OFF YOUR MACHINE and move your chair out of the way.
2. Remove the needle.
3. Sit on the floor where your chair normally goes. (If you’re lying the machine on its side or back, you don’t have to do this, obviously.)
4. Using the small Philips head screwdriver, unscrew the two small screws on each side of the light ring.
   

   Side screws (left and right arrows) and front and back screws

5. Now unscrew the two small screws at the front and back of the light ring. These are longer screws and hold the plastic cover in place. The back one is particularly awkward to get to if the machine is in the table — you’ll have to find it and unscrew it by feel alone as you can’t see it.
6. When you unscrew the last screw, the plastic housing over the light ring and the light ring will drop a little as there’s almost nothing to hold it up. However, it’s still connected to the machine, so DO NOT try to pull it down.
   

   The loosened light ring and plastic housing

7. Next, disconnect the connector at the back left of the light ring. Again, this is very fiddly as the connector is very small and the wires that connect to it are VERY short. Use tweezers to grab the top part of the connector and ‘unclick’ it from the housing in the light ring. Be careful that you don’t put any downward pressure on the connector wires/piece as you don’t want to damage these wires.
   

   Green arrow points to the connector wires

8. Once the connector has been disconnected, gently lower the plastic housing and light ring to the table. You can see how short those wires are and how small the connector piece is!
   

   Connector at rear of foot/needle housing

9. Please check that the faulty light ring’s plastic connector housing is still attached to the light ring. When I did my second change out, the connector piece on the light ring remained attached to the connector on the machine and so I couldn’t reinsert it into the new light ring with that piece still attached. So, look at the light ring that you’ve taken off and make sure that the little plastic connector housing is still attached to it (see the picture of the back view of the light ring before the start of these steps–the plastic connector housing is arrowed in green). If it isn’t attached to the light ring, use tweezers to pull it off the connector on the machine and put it back on the faulty light ring, making sure the pins go in the same direction as those on the new light ring.
10. You probably can’t get the faulty light ring out from under the foot, so you get your fingers underneath the foot and lift it a tad. Once lifted, slide the faulty light ring out and slide the new one in, leaving the plastic housing where it is. Make sure you put in the new one, not the old one!
11. Make sure the replacement light ring is facing the correct way — lights facing down and the connector at the back left when looking at the machine from the front. Slot the light ring into the plastic housing and screw in the two side screws (these are the short ones) to connect it to the housing.
    

    Screw the side screws into the light ring to secure it to the plastic housing

12. Now here comes the REALLY tricky/fiddly/awkward bit. Lift the plastic housing up almost to where it normally goes. Using tweezers, grab the loose connector piece and slot it into the connector on the light ring (you may have to reach from the right behind the foot/needle housing and go around the back to grab the loose connector piece). Use the tweezers to push it in. Did I say this was fiddly? If you have someone else to hold the plastic housing you may find it easier to connect the light ring to the machine. But there’s no getting away from this step being the most difficult and awkward.
13. Once the connector is connected, test it before putting the remaining screws back in. Turn on your machine and see if the light comes on as it should. If it does, congratulations — you got the connector properly connected! (NOTE: If the light doesn’t come on, first check that it’s turned on in the control panel — you may well have turned it off when the lights were flickering. Touch More then Options and then the icon for the lit light bulb.) If it still doesn’t come on, the connector hasn’t connected properly so repeat the previous step.
14. Turn the machine off again and screw in the remaining screws (front and back). Screw in the front one first. The back one is the hardest to screw in as you can’t see what you’re doing and will have to go by touch alone.
15. And you’re done! Put your needle back in, turn on your machine, and off you go.

I don’t know where I learned to do this quilting motif that I call ‘open headband’ — perhaps Leah Day’s Free Motion Quilting Project, or maybe Diane Gaudynski’s excellent book on free motion quilting, or perhaps Helen Godden’s DVD, or maybe my own variation of techniques learned from all three. Anyhow, I use it often and find it a very relaxing motif that can be quilted large or small and that fits into all sorts of places.

Several people have asked me to share how I do it, so today I got a piece of paper and a Sharpie and took some (very amateur) photos of how the motif goes. I realised I’m much better on the Sweet Sixteen than I am with my drawing! But hopefully this will help you get started.

General tips:

• Start this motif near the centre of the quilt and move out in an overall circular direction — this flattens out any wonkiness and pushes puckers out to the edge. Don’t be tempted to fill a quarter of the quilt, then move to another quarter — if the quilt is even slightly wonky, you may end up with puckers and pleats in the middle of the quilt.
• While I mostly do three hops around the arc, sometimes I do four so that I don’t end up with a long streamer of these motifs all going in one direction across the quilt. The fourth hop allows me to go off in a different direction, thus covering the quilt in an apparent random fashion.
• Use the ‘needle down’ position on your machine. If you have to stop in the middle of an arc or at a point, then you’ll be able to start again without being a stitch or two ‘out’.

So here are my photos with some instructions.

Start by stitching a semi-circle/arc near the centre of the quilt (the arrow shows the direction I use, but go in whatever direction feels comfortable to you):

At the end of the arc, stitch another arc back towards your starting point, but not quite coming even with it. Echo the general semi-circle shape, but don’t try to echo at a specific distance from the original arc (my drawing below shows a VERY uneven second arc!):

Now bounce back with a third arc extending from the end of the second arc. Again, you’re following the arc’s general shape, but you’re NOT trying to get an even distance from it:

You’ve now done what I call ‘three hops’ — the arc and two echo lines. Next, you create a new ‘headband’ by starting a new arc at an angle off from the end of the third arc; I try to put this arc next to the earlier one so that I don’t end up with awkward gaps later — in other words, I fill the empty spaces as I go:

After creating the second arc, stitch two more echoing arcs around it, just like you did for the first one:

At the end of the third echo, bounce out in a different direction to create another small arc and echo it just like the previous two:

To stop you going off in an overall diagonal, this time do a fourth echo (not the three you’ve done previously):

At the end of the fourth echo, bounce out in a different direction to create another small arc and echo it just like you’ve done with the others. You should only need three bounces this time, though there’s no hard and fast rule:

Create the next arc off the end of the third echo point, and keep going creating arcs and three or four echoes until you’ve filled the entire area or the whole quilt!

And here’s an example of it finished (you can see that I’m much more even on the machine than with a pen!):

For those who were asking… Here’s a quick photo of my Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen overlay taped onto the table, using painters tape.

And my thoughts on the overlay and the HQ Sweet Sixteen table height differential:

I have the overlay for my S16 so I feel I can offer some thoughts from a position of having used it as versus looking at pictures on the internet and assuming I know what it does etc.

It’s retail price in Australia was about $100 (I think it was $99). I don’t know what the price is in the US.

Do I regret buying it? Not a bit! Do I use rulers? Hardly at all. Did I use the SupremeSlider? Yes, but I don’t now. Were my quilts getting ‘caught’ occasionally on the table? I didn’t think so, but since having the overlay they move much more smoothly over the surface and therefore under the needle. The overlay is not a laminate or melamine – I don’t know what it is, but it’s very smooth… much smoother than the SupremeSlider. I’ve also sprayed the overlay with silicone spray and that makes it doubly as smooth.

Did I try various methods of lowering the height of the machine? Yes, but with little success (anything paper-based was going to squash down over time), and removing the rubber feet was awkward (though likely a one-off task). Why did I want to lower the machine (or raise the table)? Because there are two issues – one was that the machine base was just a tad too high (and this affects ruler work, but remember, I rarely use rulers); the other was that there’s a slight gap between the table and the machine as there has to be as the machine throat base is slightly curved and table is square. And sometimes a quilt gets caught in that gap. And lint gets caught in that gap. With the overlay, there’s NO GAP for anything to get caught in and the height difference between the machine and table is eliminated.

Could HQ design a better match between the table and the machine? Perhaps. But from what I’ve been reading here, some people say the height is too high by 1/16 or 1/8 or ¼ an inch, while others say it’s too low by similar amounts. How does HQ deal with that? To be honest, I think the real problem that HQ have is with the rubber feet. If those feet come from the manufacturer in slightly different sizes or are screwed in slightly differently from one machine to another, then each machine will sit in the table in a slightly different way. If, for future purchasers, HQ raise the height of the table a tad, will it actually solve the problem if the problem is really with the height and setting of the rubber feet? And don’t forget that the feet may well compress a little over time, and you’d still end up with a height differential between the table and the machine again. Has anyone used one of these sit-down machines for 5 or 10 years – long enough to see if the feet compress over time?

As far as the Tiara is concerned, I’ve only seen the same pictures/videos on the internet that people have shared over the past few days. And as someone who has the overlay, I can categorically state that all the pictures/videos of the Tiara I’ve seen ALL HAVE THE OVERLAY. Babylock have done nothing different with the table that I can see.

One final thing about the overlay… My dealer advised me NOT to secure it permanently with the tape that’s supplied as she said it WILL tear the laminate on the table top if ever I wanted to take the overlay off. I followed her advice and have it secured with about 10 small strips of blue painter’s tape (see above), which I can add/remove at will – cheap, quick, easy. Though having used the overlay now, I would never go back to quilting on the ‘bare’ table.

Remember, I don’t do ruler work but in my opinion the overlay is worth every cent I paid for it. And in my opinion it’s an optional extra (like in a car), just like the TruStitch is an optional extra.