Longarm-Type Quilting Samples

When I first started using my longarm machine, a longarm quilting machine is just a great big machine, sits on rollers, and usually they have a front and a back to them. You can quilt from the back of the machine, or you can quilt from the front of the machine. And I was so afraid to do any kind of free motion quilting that all I did was pantagrams, which are, pantographs, which are just on a long sheet of paper, and you just follow 'em with the laser printer, a laser, and then you just do it from edge, it's called edge to edge quilting. But I finally took some classes, and I moved to the front of my machine and I started doing some free motion quilting. There are some designs that are real easy to do, and I'm gonna show you some that anybody can do, whether it's on your domestic machine, your short arm or your longarm machine. So, what I like to start with is what I call a hook. These are examples of hook. And so, there's some big hooks. There's some little hooks. And basically what a hook is, it's just, you start in the center and you hook around like that. That's a hook. So a lot of patterns start with the hook. So this was just a meandering hook, and all you did is keep doing these little hooks and you can go in all different directions. Now I can quilt better than I can draw, but you can see you can do a whole quilt just by using this little hook, just like that. You can go in all different directions, and they don't have to be perfect. But you can see you can fill up a whole quilt just using this hook design. This next one is one that I did a lot of quilts in, and it's called a rose, and again, it starts with a hook. So the hook's in the center, and it goes and it just makes little humps all the way around it, and you can make 'em as big or as little as you want. So to make a rose, you start with a hook and then you just make humps that go all the way around it. And you make bigger humps, and then you keep doing that until you're ready to do a new rose. And so, then you start with a hook and then you do humps, and you start with another one and a hook, and then do humps. So you can see that's not that hard to do. Now mine are kind of crooked and not perfect. But again, you can see it's not a really hard design. The next one is another type of, it's called a star flower or a pointy flower. And again, it starts with a hook, and instead of making hoops, loops or humps, I make little spikes. So again, I'm gonna start with a hook and then I'm gonna make these spikes all the way around that hook. You can make 'em skinny, you can make 'em fat, you can make 'em whatever size you want, and then you go and make another hook and then you make spikes. So you can see it's just a matter of doing it all the way around your hook. When you get back to the beginning, you go into another hook and then you do spikes. So you can see, you can fill up a quilt or an area with these kinds of designs. So there's your star flower. The next kind, here's a hook that I did with, for a, instead of feathers. Now, when I'm doing feathers, I'm not really good at perfect feathers. So instead of doing regular traditional feathers, I can do a hook feather, and they don't have to be perfect and they can be all different sizes, all different looks. And so, this is how you do a hook feather. You start with a spine and go back, and then you just make these little hooks. And you can connect the hooks. You can make 'em fat or skinny. Of course, like I said, I go back to the beginning. I quilt better than I draw, but you can see I can make these hook feathers. They don't look so bad. I mean, you could add some things inside here. You can add little hooks. You can add designs inside. But it's another way of making a feather. The next kind of design that's fairly easy to do, and this is another one that I started with because it was something that I could do. It's called a shell, and a shell just starts with a a little loop, and you work around that little loop. So let me show you what a shell looks like. A shell just starts with a little teardrop, and you just work back to the beginning of that teardrop, and you keep making teardrops around it and keep going back to the center, and you just work around those teardrops like this. All right, my hand is very wobbly today, so you can see these aren't perfect, but you can work teardrops in any direction and you can just, wherever you stop, you start a new teardrop. And you can work these around your quilt and you can fill up the whole area with teardrops. This next design is like a teardrop, but it has a little hook in the side of it, inside of it. So I can do that by starting with a hook, again. Start with a little hook and then do a teardrop. Start with a hook and do a teardrop. Do a hook and a teardrop, hook and a teardrop. So you can see you can do all kinds of things in that teardrop and still create some interesting designs. And you can do this over the whole edge of your quilt. You can do it in a border. You can do it in all different places. This last one is one that's a little more difficult, but it's not as difficult as it looks, and you have to start with a grid. So I'm just gonna make a real rudimentary grid here. Let's draw it. You can make it bigger squares if you wanted to, but basically you're doing a grid. And so, you can either do spikes in that grid and then you just vary the directions. Takes a little bit of thought because you have to think about what direction you want to go in. So sometimes, I have to stop at the corners and think about what direction I want to go in. So you just go in opposite directions, up and down and across. You can see you can create an interesting design with spikes, or you can do curves or figure eights. And you go in different directions, just like this. Up and down. Side to side, up and down, side to side. So you can see you can do that. You can make 'em bigger if you wanted to make bigger squares, so that wouldn't take as long. So again, you can just do spikes. Up and down, across. Up and down, across. Or you can do the curves. You want to be sure to go all the way to the end. So those are just some examples of some easy quilt designs that you can do, either on your domestic machine, your longarm or your short arm machine. So I encourage you to get in the front of the machine, kind of play and see what you come up with.