How to Write on Your Quilt with Free Motion Quilting

Free motion quilting is not only a great way to quilt your quilt but it's a great way to be able to add either a signature to your quilt, or maybe even if you want to write something sentimental inside your quilt somewhere for whoever it is you're giving it to. Now, maybe you've done a lot of free motion quilting in the past and you're pretty comfortable with some common quilting designs but writing can be a whole nother element that's a little bit more tricky than you think. I know when I first tried it, it didn't turn out quite as well as I'd hoped. So I found a quick and easy way to practice and that is to actually print some lettering off on just some printer paper. And I just went into a Microsoft Word and I just picked a font that I liked. Cursive fonts will usually work easier because when you actually put them together into words, all of your letters run together like you would want them to when you're doing free motion script. Then I'm just going to simply take my piece of paper, I'm going to layer it over the top of a piece of fabric. I'm going to take it over to my machine and I'm going to free motion stitch some of these letters. Now what I'm doing with using this piece of paper on the top is I'm sort of getting the muscle memory for what letters are like because letters are not something that I normally do a lot of stitching of. It's something that might feel a little bit weird when you're doing it. So having these letters already printed on there kind of gives you a line to follow. Sort of done one letter, go ahead and move into the next. Like so. Right into our next letter. I'll do the last letter in this row, and then we'll see what it looks like. Okay. Then I can just take this over, trim my threads like so. And now, you can see I have some stitching and I've done pretty good. Following the printed letters. Sometimes I got a little bit off. I might've swung too wide here on my L, but in general, following those letters makes it really easy to be able to get a feel for doing lettering. So if I bring my other sample back in you can see I've already started doing the first couple of lines of the alphabet. This is me following the printed paper. Down here, I tried to draw the A and the B in place. I even tried to just free hand the C and the D. And you can see how this doesn't look near as good as this does up here. It's way more even. So by printing out some letters and using a piece of paper over the top of your fabric, you can really get a feel for how letters should feel when you're quilting them. Now, if you plan to sign your quilts like I may decide that I want to actually sign my name. Well, that's what I'm actually going to type out and print. So I'm actually going to, to put it on my computer. I just picked a very large font. I'd probably do a much smaller size but I actually was planning to do a signature on my quilts, print it out, put it over a piece of paper, and then I'm just going to repeatedly practice my signature. Whatever it is I want to write on there, I can practice it and know that I'm eventually going to get it to look exactly the way I want because I have this printed alphabet that I'm following. So it's just a really fun way to sort of give yourself some practice when it comes to doing some free motion quilting or some free motion writing is to actually print out your letters and give yourself a guide to follow using that printed template. So give it a try. I think you're going to like the way your alphabet turns out using this method, rather than just trying to jump right into it and go without anything to follow.