I returned from the International Quilt Festival in Houston with more than just a little fabric. I purchased one of John Flynn’s Multi-Frames. Toting it home in its unassuming packaging, it might be hard for folks to appreciate how cool this thing is, but it was what I was most excited about.
It has taken me little more than a week to unpackage it, read through instructions, watch the DVD, and accomplish a good size sample, amid lots of other distractions of daily life. As I write this, I’m about to begin my first quilt on the frame and quite possibly will be finished by the end of the evening.
The beauty of his frame system is that it eliminates the need to baste or pin layers together, both methods that have never fully maintained tension for me for machine quilting and sometimes result in puckering. Certainly there are a few limitations to the frame when one compares it to a mid- or long-arm quilting machine system. Perhaps one of the most obvious is that one gets much more “active space” on a fancier system. Also, it came with rollers that are 48″ long which limits you initially in the width of a project; though Flynn happily tells you how to get longer rollers at a hardware store inexpensively to do larger projects.
However, for someone like me who has neither the funds nor the space for a fancy quilting machine, Mr. Flynn’s frame has significant advantages. I can essentially turn my own machine into a frame-based quilting machine by positioning it on end, which means I’m not investing in what would be a 2nd machine that I might only use periodically. Flynn’s frame is also space saving and something I can take apart and store easily. But the biggest carrot for me was that I could afford it. For $130, the frame is going to help me complete quilts faster and I can inexpensively expand it for larger projects. I can use my same machine, same thread, same bobbin, etc. Considering it is 50 to 100 times cheaper than a fancy system (yes, really, for all those non-quilters out there), it is the perfect new tool for my work. Thank you very much, Mr. Flynn.