Learning to Machine quilt

9 Patch Pillow sham

Making a beautiful quilt top is only half the battle, so to speak. Putting all the layers together successfully and QUILTING it is just as important, hence the name, " a quilt".

Chosing how to quilt your quilt has a huge affect on the finished product. Quilting it in a pleasing manner can enhance the entire quilt, but the opposite is also true. I have seen a few quilts in the last 3 years since I started going to quilt shows where I felt that the manner in which it was quilted, detracted from the actual quilt top itself. Personally I don't like the quilting to be too narrow or too busy on a quilt. I prefer that the quilting stitches and pattern complement the quilt top, not compete with it for your attention.

In the past, most batting was such that it was necessary to make rows of quilt stitches quite close together, a minimum of 2 or 3 inches apart, I believe. Today's quilt batting is such that you can get away with quilt stitches up to 10 inches apart. The old batting would shift with time and/ or washing and bunch up if the quilt stitches were too far apart. Hence the machine quilting style called "stippling", (one type of machine quilting I dislike.) With stippling you sew curving lines all over the quilt, working in small sections.

Meandering is similar, but the rows of stitches are further apart and I find it more appealing. Stippling reminds me of the diagrams you used to see in your science books as a child of the brain with all the convoluted bumps, creases and crenullations. I always found that quite ugly.

One way to quilt your blocks are, as I mentioned, the style called 'in the ditch" where you follow closely the stitches on the quilt top, hiding them in the 'well' of the fabric pieces. Use a 'walking foot' and start by back stitching several short stitches at the beginning of each stitch line to secure the thread.

(See "9 Patch Pizzaz" March blog for further details about how to roll your quilt and start machine quilting. You can use any type of sewing machine to do this. It doesn't have to be the coveted long arm machine.) :)

A similar form of quilting is echo quilting where you quilt rows of stitches about a quarter inch outside of your quilt top stitch lines. Some blocks look good with that method especially applique.

Another quilting method that I have seen on quilts is 'channel quilting' where you stitch parallel quilting lines across your entire quilt. I have never tried this so I really can't tell you much about it.

Template quilting is another method where you mark a design on your quilt with a marking pencil (which wipes off or fades) and a plastic stencil. Then you quilt along the stencil lines.

You can also do template quilting with tear away paper stencils.

After I hand quilted my huge queen size sunflower quilt, which took 3 years to complete, I decided I needed to learn to do something that went faster.

I had designed and sewed 2 pillow shams to match the sunflower quilt after that and decided to try machine quilting with them. The 'in the ditch" quilting went well on the blocks, but then I came to the border.

"Hmmmm... maybe a nice stencil pattern," I thought, so I bought a book of patterns. I paged through it and found several I liked that looked relatively easy.

"Maybe I could scan a pattern on the computer and print it , then cut the strips out and pin them where I want to quilt that pattern", I thought.

So that's just what I did. I meticulously quilted all along the pinned pattern on the border of the first pillow sham. Then it was time to get the paper off. It resisted my pulling and so I tugged harder. Bits and pieces of paper came off around the stitches, but many of the stitches ripped too! It took a long time to remove all the paper and I had to re-sew a lot of sections.

This really wasn't working very well.

"Now what?"I thought.

I looked for advice in some of my quilt magazines and realized that I had to make tinier stitches for one. I tried that and it worked better but still not 100%. Then I realized that maybe computer paper was too strong.

The next time I drove to town, I went to the quilt shop there and asked the proprietress. She told me you had to use a special thin paper that ripped off easily. It's called "Golden Thread quilting paper". It looks a lot like tissue paper only a bit stronger. You have to trace your design on it manually which is very time consuming. But that's what I did all around the inner border of the 9 Patch pillow sham ( see above) and it worked well.

After that I took a Saturday class on free motion machine quilting and I really like that method for doing large areas like borders. Maybe one day I'll get a long arm machine and get really fancy, but for now, free motion serves its purpose. It does use a LOT of thread, but it's quick, it's fun, sometimes frustrating, and you can be quite creative.