Quilting is probably my least favorite step in the process of making a quilt. It's also, probably because I send quilts out pretty often, my biggest
problem growth area. I just haven't put in the time on quilting that I need to in order to have those gorgeous even stitches and in order to get onto the quilt what is in my head.
I tend to like quilting that is somewhere between an all-over pattern with no relationship with the patchwork and a one that is micro-coordinated to the patchwork. Usually, this results in either a fairly minimal all-over design (see the
The DoublePlusGood Quilt,
Miss Stinky's Particle Board Cabin) or for a long time I have favored straight-line quilting (
The Full Stops Quilt,
The Green Quilt,
The Kelp Quilt). It probably helps that these designs are pretty straightforward requests for me to make of my lovely local long-arm quilter, Bernie.
I also tend to send things out to the long-arm quilter when I'm short on time or when I've made a large quilt (and most of my quilts are large!)
I recently realized that I need to do more of my own quilting. Why? Because I came across this work in progress:
I made this quilt top in 2005. 2005. 2005. I f**king love this quilt top and it hasn't been quilted because I haven't developed the skills to execute what is in my head. ARGH!!!! Time to grow some ovaries, slap that darning foot on
my little Janome, and get to work!
I had a few lap-sized quilts in need of quilting, so I decided to woman-up and quilt them myself. Unfortunately, I can't show you the quilt tops (gifts and such), but suffice it to say that I wanted something non-swirly and non-straight-line and moderately dense.
My go-to-spot for browsing free-motion quilting designs is
The Free Motion Quilting Project from Leah Day. More than 365 designs being given away for free with pictures and videos and explanations? Yes, please! They are also, very helpfully, categorized in multiple ways, including
difficulty,
design type, and
directional texture.
I decided to practice on a small quilt I anticipate donating to charity.
This is the
Basic Chevron design. Pretty easy. I got much better as I went, so I was glad to be working on a practice quilt as I got the worst of the wobbles out of my system.
I then slept on it (your brain processes skills as you sleep, making you much better on the start of day 2, than you were at the end of day 1. Seriously, here's my reference:
RadioLab. Yay science!)
On the second quilt, I decided to use the
Square Spiral
Again, it was a bit clunky at first, but I practiced a bit, slept on it, practiced a bit more and then was competent enough to do it on a "real" quilt.
My practice quilt doesn't look half-bad though!
The actual quilts were similar to the practice quilt in that they had a columns of patchwork and I wanted to quilt in a way that went with the columns. Like the practice quilt, there are two passes of the quilting within each column. I tried the chevrons wider, but I lost control doing something that wide on my machine. I think I am going to invest in some grippy gloves and see if that helps with control. Leah Day sells
quilting kits with gloves and sliders, so I'll pick one up from her, since her shop is how she supports her awesome website.
For more tips and tricks on quilting, check out these other posts:
https://rossiecrafts.com/2015/03/learning-more-about-free-motion-quilting.html
https://rossiecrafts.com/2013/09/handquilting.html
https://rossiecrafts.com/2013/08/rainbow-quilt-of-experimentation.html
