Free Motion Quilting

Free motion quilting is a fast, fun, easy way to finish your quilts. I hope you'll give it a try. I have my sewing machine all set up for free motion quilting, which means I've lowered the feed dogs and I've used, put on a darning foot, or a free motion foot. This means that the needle will just go up and down, and you are going to control the size and the direction of the stitches by moving the quilt with your hands. I have my grippy gloves on to help me control the quilt.

You also could find, oh, the secretary's fingers will work. I've also seen some people use sponges with grips, and they'll use those sponges and hold it on the quilt to help hold and control the quilt. Whatever you wanna try, try 'em all and see what works best for you. I made this little quilt to do some quilting on. I have something like this on hand all the time to do my practicing, because I find I'll do a better job on a little quilt than if I'm just working on a little piece of fabric.

It also gets you used to sewing on something a little bit larger, which is helpful. There's nothing like practice to help you get better. To start this, I'm going to take a single stitch, and I'll pull the top thread to bring the bobbin thread up, to get those out of the way. If I left them on the back, I would end up with a tangly mess on the back when I'm all done. If you have a needle down function on your sewing machine, you're gonna wanna use it now.

So here I am needle down, and now I'm going to sew a couple of, quilt a couple of different designs in this little thin border. The border is a handy thing to be stitching in because it gives me a size to look for. It gives me borderlines for where I'm going, boundaries. And I'm gonna start doing what I think of as ribbon candy. I do a loop and come close to the stitching on the previous pass, and I'm stitching almost to the edge of the border as I do this.

Don't worry if it's not perfect. That's why I've made a baby quilt. No baby is gonna complain that your stitches aren't perfect or that you haven't stayed inside the lines. You stop whenever you need to and readjust. You do not wanna be having to pull the weight of your quilts, so stop as often as you need to to readjust the quilt.

And I'm gonna continue to do this, what I think of as ribbon candy quilting. When you get to a safety pin, it's a really good idea to take it out before you run into it. This little quilt has been basted together with safety pins about a hands width apart to keep all the layers together. Ideally, it's nice to baste it, placing the safety pins where you're not gonna stitch, but I often don't have a plan for my quilting before I baste it, and I'll just have to stop and take the pins out. So I think you can see how this is looking.

I probably will switch and do another pattern in a little bit. I'm actually doing this a little bit faster than I would just to get to the other edge so I can switch to a different pattern. Again, a pin in the way. And hopefully this is looking a little bit like the ribbon candy I described. When you get to the corners, that can be a challenge.

You just decide whether you want to run the pattern all the way to the edge or if you wanna do something to change in the corner. I'm gonna do a loop in the corner. I've turned the corner and I'm gonna try another pattern here. Try, no, I'm gonna do another pattern here. I'm gonna do some loops.

And I'm actually trying to keep my eye on the seams. That will help me space these sort of evenly. They would be much more even if I weren't trying to talk while I did this, but at least it gives me kind of an idea. If I put in three or four loops next to each one of these squares, I'll be able to keep things spaced fairly evenly. So I'm just thinking of these as letter Es written sideways, and I'm trying to stay within the seam lines of this little orange border.

And now I could switch to a different kind of loop. So I'm going to do one loop going this way and one loop going the other way. Let's see if I can do that while I'm talking. There we go. I like to stitch these little borders first because it helps stabilize the center part that I'm going to do next.

And I'm nearing a corner, so I'm going to change to another pattern on this next border. Okay, well, I've done all curved lines here, I think I'll try something that's maybe a little bit straighter. I see a pin in the way, so I'm gonna take it out right now, and I'm going to do kind of a zigzag. I'm going sideways, and now up and down with a zigzag. There's a magic number to doing this.

If you do an odd number sideways and an odd number vertically, you'll be able to continue. So I'm going to go one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. And it keeps you going the same direction. If I picked an even number for this vertical part, I would end up sewing myself into a corner. I'd be backup over here.

It's not the end of the world if you do that, you just end the thread and start all over again. I'm nearing another corner, so I'll stop here and think of another pattern to do. Another nice, simple, continuous pattern is a spiral. So I'm going to come down here and do a spiral. I wanna stitch into the spiral and leave myself enough room to stitch out of the spiral and move farther down the border and start another spiral.

So here we go. I'm going into the spiral, turning and coming out of the spiral, going into the spiral, coming out of the spiral. The idea is to find patterns where you can sew continuously starting at one end of the border and getting all the way to the other end without having to make stops. And I'm just about to the end of this border. I'm going to stop now and prepare to do some quilting here in the center of the quilt.

Now that I'm finished with the border, I'm gonna quilt something on the inside. I thought it would be nice to put a little message to the baby on here, so I'm going to write, "Sweet dreams," and because I'm writing, stitching and writing in cursive, it'll be a continuous line. I'm going to look at this space that I have for the word "Sweet" and figure out about what size those letters need to be to fit in here. I'm going to fit the capital letter S into this space, and then try to fit the rest of the letters for "Sweet" in this portion right here. Hope I don't hit the edge before I get to the end of the T.

So I'm starting once again by taking a single stitch and bringing the bobbin thread up. Again, I use my needle down function, and I'm going to start my capital S right here. Oh, I see a pin that should be removed. So here we go with the S. And I'm going to do this all continuously, so I've put a loop on the end of the S to go right into the W.

There's the W. And I'm trying to kind of keep an eye on how much space I have left here. It's a little bit hard for me to see because it's under here, under the arm of the machine, but I have kind of an idea about how much room I have for the rest of the word. So here's an E. And another E.

I see a pin that's going to be in the way with the T, so I'll take that out. I know that when I do this letter T, I don't wanna stop to cross the T, so I'm going to cross it as I start down. There's the T, and I'm gonna cross it while I'm here. And there's the end. I can end with several little stitches, and I'm going to cut off the thread, because I don't want this dark green thread to carry across to the other side when I start the D.

And once again, I'm gonna see if I can get the bobbin thread pulled up to be out of the way. I use my seam ripper to just grab the loop. So I've got both the top and the bobbin thread out of the way so I don't have a tangly mess, and I'm going to do the the word "Dreams" down here in this portion. I see some pins to remove. And I've thought about how I can do the word "Dreams" starting with a capital D and not having a stop until I get to the word, to the end of the word "Dreams." So I'm starting at the top of the capital D.

Oop, needle down, and. There's a loop on the capital D. You might not write it this way when you're writing on a piece of paper, but when it comes to quilting it's pretty handy to be able to write in a continuous line, without stopping between any of the letters. There's my D, R. Now I'm finished with my words in here.

I'm gonna change colors of thread and do a few background fills. These are nice, simple background fills that you can adapt to other styles if you'd like to. Again, one stitch, pull up the bobbin thread, use my needle down function. If you don't have a needle down function on your machine, you can just roll the wheel so your needle is down every time that you stop. And I'm just going to quilt little loop-de-loops.

I'm going counter-clockwise and then clockwise, and just filling in the background area. This will help the words "Sweet dreams" stand out a little bit better, and part of what I really like about this loop-de-loop pattern is you can easily go anywhere you want to on the quilt. If I decide I wanna stitch a little bit farther down here, I just aim in that direction, and if I need to come back up here, I just do a longer curl before coming up to fill in this area. This is a real adaptable pattern, because you see I'm putting little circles or loops on here, but instead of circles, you could stitch a curve and then stop and do a five pointed star, or whatever that was. Not quite a five pointed star.

And then do some more curls. You could do a heart here. So you can see, it's a very adaptable kind of a background fill. I'm not gonna fill up the entire quilt for you because I wanna show you a few other things. I'm gonna show you how to end the threads, how to tie off threads to make nice, neat endings.

So I'll finish this quilt later, but I'm gonna go back to the beginning. It's possible to just trim those threads off and be done with them, but I like a little bit neater endings. If I just trim this off, I'd have little threads there, and even if I started with little tiny stitches, there's the chance that they might start to come undone, and I'm sure a baby quilt's gonna be washed a lot of times, so I like to bury those threads instead. This is a trick I learned when I was doing needle point. This is the way that needle point people thread yarn into their needles.

I've got two threads here, and this is a darning needle. It's a thick needle, and it has a really big eye in it. So I'm gonna thread both of those threads through here, and if I just fold the threads in half, it's both of them, and I pinch 'em between my index finger and my thumb, take the end of the needle that has the eye, that's the helpful part, and you put it right up to where the thread is pinched in, you release it right into the eye of the needle. And that's two threads into the eye of the needle right there. And then I like to just bury those threads.

I'm going back down into the same hole that the bobbin thread came up, and bury the threads. Come out maybe an inch or so away, and then clip those off. I think that's a little bit more secure ending than clipping right at the point where you stopped. And now, next I'm going to move on to doing some different quilting designs in the squares here. Now we have all these squares out here to fill in, and I'm gonna show you just a couple of patterns that you can use for quilting these, this kind of a patchwork.

You can do your planning on graph paper. It's a great way to figure out what you want to sew, and you also want to quilt along a path that takes you the direction that you want to go. I'm going to just do some simple curves outlining each of the straight seams here. And I'll just do a little portion of this so you get the idea of how the pathway goes to be able to sew in a continuous way. So I'm just doing a curve, coming out about maybe a half an inch from the seam, and then curving back into the join of these two seams.

And now I'm going to do the next edge, I'm skipping over to the next block. This will give me a continuous path to be able to sew curves along a large section of these squares. Once again, needle down is a very handy feature, and if you don't have it just roll the wheel, flywheel of your sewing machine to put the needle down each time you stop. And another curve back to this intersection. And along here.

Curve back up to this area. I'm gonna turn and come back the other way so you don't have to watch me quilt this whole border. So this time when I get to this area, I'm going to quilt this side of the square, and I'm gonna curve to the other side and do this side, that bottom one. I think you'll be able to see in just a little bit how I can get all of the squares along this path quilted in this manner. I'm gonna turn and come back here, and now I have the opportunity to stitch down along this seem to get the bottom row of squares.

So I'm going to come down to here. Because I know I'll have a quarter inch seam allowance used here for my binding, I'm going to leave a quarter inch of it unstitched. I'm moving back into the seam a quarter of an inch from the raw edge, and come back up here. Now I can finish this edge of that square, and I'm coming down to this area again, stopping a quarter of an inch from the edge, and back up. And I have this side of the square to fill now.

I think you're seeing the pattern here. If you get out graph paper and draw it, you'll be able to figure out where you're going. There are a lot of different paths you can take to end up with the same pattern. And I still have this bottom edge to do to be able to complete this. I got a pin I didn't get taken out when I should have.

And so now I'm going to stich backwards to fill in that last row of curves. That's the beauty of free motion quilting, is you can stitch in any direction, and sometimes it's hard to see where you're going. You're allowed to move over to the side and look if you want to. Some people think of it as kind of a Zen thing. You know about the size of those squares, so just trust that you're curving in at the right area.

And this finishes up that portion of the patterns. You've got nice curves along here, which is a really good way to fill this out. I could have done the entire quilt all in one fell swoop if I had planned it all and if you wanted to watch me quote the whole thing. I'm going to switch now and do a different kind of a pattern just to show you another way to fill these up. Stitching straight lines with free motion quilting is not the best advantage of free motion quilting, so lots of times people will stitch a straight grid diagonally through squares.

Well, with that idea in mind, you could do it but with a curved line, and it will still give you a nice, finished look. I'm going to move another pin so I don't break a needle, and go through this diagonally, just with some gentle curves diagonally. I know that if I tried to free motion quilt a straight line through here, it would be a mess, so you might as well just take advantage of the fact that the machine does better curves with free motion than it does straight lines. And I curved and come, I turned and come back up the other direction. I keep having to remove pins because you don't wanna run through 'em or get too close to them.

And you'll see that you can just keep going in just about any direction with these kinds of gentle curves. That looks a lot better than probably straight line quilting with free motion techniques would look. If I want to come down to this side and cross all of those gentle lines already, I can just come down here and go the other direction, just stitch curves this way. So I've got kind of curvy Xs through all of these squares. So there's, those are just a couple of ways to fill in this kind of piecing.

Let me get down here. I can probably do one more for you. I'm going to do a diagonal spiral. I'm gonna come diagonally to the center of this square and do a spiral, and then go back to the diagonal to finish out that square, and do the same thing on the next square. Diagonally about halfway through stitch a spiral, just because you want it, whatever size pleases you, and then go back out to the edge of the, to the corner of the square again.

And this gives you another interesting little pattern to quilt in here. So those are just three, just three of the zillions of ways that this checkerboard border could have been quilted. Where I'm now going to show you some different kinds of patterns to do on other kinds of quilts that maybe wouldn't lend themselves quite so well to a baby quilt. This one, the free motion quilting, repeats the piecing in the block in the quilt. You can use a piece of quarter-inch tape to mark the lines in between the designs, and it's just straight lines, free motion quilting, where you go down and at an angle, down at the opposite angle, and down, and it just repeated the piecing that's already in this quilt.

I used variegated threads so it would show up in a few places. This little unfinished piece is obviously a spider. I did mark part of the spider because I couldn't have drawn that without the help of some marks, but I did the zigzag fills free motion and unmarked, and no, they're not exactly the same distance apart, but I think that kind of adds to the charm of it. The background filling in here is just going around in circles and circles. Because this is very tightly quilted, it makes the rest of the design kind of pop.

I'll someday put some more quilting in the rest of it so that the outer circle or the outer oval pops a little bit more. This quilt has some interesting free motion design in the border. I wanted to follow the watery look of the batik, and I used, once again, a variegated thread. To be able to keep the distance between these curved lines about the same, I use the width of my darning foot as a guide. So I would stitch with the edge of the foot along the edge of the previous line of stitching.

And it's not exactly the same. I would do some curves and come in this direction and then go back and fill it in. It's one of those things you might wanna practice with paper and pencil before you start stitching on your quilt. This is the last piece I have to show you here, and this little picture quilt needed some texture to help define the areas in it. This is supposed to be a cactus pad, and once again, it's the curved, going around in a circle kind of quilting, where you're stitching almost on top of the same curve and then swing out to start another circle.

And I tried not to have perfect circles, which was kind of nice to not try to be perfect, and I thought it gave it a little bit more texture. This portion right here is some, like stippling, but it's with straight lines. So I've got kind of triangles and straight lines going there. And over here I did some curved lines to define the edges of the petals. Free motion quilting is a really fun technique to do.

I hope you'll give it a try if you haven't, and if you do already do it, do some more practice. The more you practice, the better you'll get, and I hope I've given you some ideas for some different designs in your quilting.