Machine Quilting Tutorial: Techniques and Tips

. My students and my friends are really, really tired of hearing this, but I love, love, love, love to machine quilt. I didn't always though. In fact I don't think I fell in love with it until I really felt like I was good at it. And the only way I became good at it was by practicing, practicing, practicing, practicing.

It felt like it took forever, but once I got a handle on it, it's just the most fun I have in my sewing room. Machine quilting especially free motion machine quilting has that wonderful word free in it. And that's what it is it's absolute total freedom. Anything you can doodle, you can quilt on your quilt. That doesn't necessarily mean it's always the best choice though.

So making good choices is important. One of the best ways I know of to learn to machine quilt is a really kind of a simple thing that humans can do to learn new habits. And that is to work for 20 minutes a day at something for 21 days in a row. It's kind of what we need to form that habit. And machine quilting is a body language.

It's like learning how to do the tango or learning how to move your arms and your fingers when you're learning to play the violin and it takes constant repetition. And unfortunately most of us we start to quilt something it looks horrible we don't finish it, or we do finish it we don't wanna quilt again. But practice really is the answer. I don't believe it takes any talent to machine quilt. I really don't.

In fact I don't even believe in talent, I believe in hard work. And so if you wanna become a really good machine quilter practice it. When I stitched out these wonderful books filled with different quilting designs, my whole world changed. Number one it increased my skills so I became better at what I do, but number two it also built a resource so that now when I go to quilt a quilt, I can look through my resource pages and choose which designs I'm gonna use on a quilt, and know what they're going to look like because I've already got them stitched out. When I decided to do this, I chose a 10 by 10 format.

So all my pages are 10 inches by 10 inches. And I simply fill each page with a different design. I don't do a page until I practiced it a little bit on a piece of practice muslin and I use solid colored fabrics. So whenever I'm at the quilt store, I just find new colors of solid fabric. So that it's really gonna show my stitch.

However I tend to use threads that somewhat matched the fabric cause that's what I do when I quilt. So let me show you some ways that I practice and increase my skills and machine quilting. First of all I jumped right into quilts. I don't believe in having a practice quilt per say, but I do believe that every time I quilt I'm practicing that skill. And so I'm wanting to entertain myself and learn something new at the same time.

In this quilt I used three layers of batting instead of the two that I normally use these days, I really wanted the quilting to show and I wanted to teach the value of the different densities of quilting. So when we look at this quilt, we can see in this area here that the quilting is very, very close together. It's a stipple that's about every eighth of an inch. So that's called micro stippling and it's quite tiny. And the stippling is simply echoing the shape of the leaves and the stems and this little border section.

So here in this area I put in some swirls with undulating lines that just added this wonderful sense of movement to the background of the birds. There's like a wind blowing behind them. I came out here to the border and put in a wavy line right about in the center of the quilt on each side. So that I had kind of a an area there that I could put in some words that I wanted to. And so I wrote this little prose or poem about the birds and quilted that in there, and then filled in the negative space of the border with tight little circles.

All of these things are working together to add some visual interest to this very simply painted quilt. So the quilting is very integral to the design of the quilt. It's not just something I did at the end to hold the layers together. Now you don't have to be really adept at free motion quilting to add something interesting to your work. This particular quilt had really simple piecing.

And then on top of the piecing, I did some stamping, but when I was done I still wasn't you know feeling it, it wasn't all that interesting. I knew that I wanted to kind of increase the feeling of modern and the straight lines and the angular geometric sort of thing that was happening. So instead of putting curvy lines on, which is what I would normally want to do, I continued with the straight lines and I used my walking foot. However instead of keeping those lines right inside the shapes, I actually quilted the lines on top of the shapes and made new shapes. So we have kind of layers of interest here.

The quilting is one layer. The painting is another layer and the piecing is another, but the three are working with each other. Again the quilting isn't there just to hold those layers together it's there to add some interest to the quilt. Now when you get to the point that you really kind of wanna show off what you do with machine quilting, trying a whole cloth quilt is a great way to kind of hone those skills. So here I have a quilt that is a piece of velvet.

And so it has a different feel to it different surface, and it responds to the stitch in a different way. I put two layers of batting in it so that I knew I'd get a lot of good relief. And then I chose some very simple stitches, some designs that were not too fancy, but that would get some good attention. And I made sure that they had a different scale and a different style. So around the flowers I put in lots of little tiny circles of stones.

So we have this tight tiny curve around the slightly curved flowers. And then next to those circles, I put in lots of straight lines and those straight lines are forming paths across the surface of the quilt. And after that lines I put in feathers and the feathers are moving in all sorts of direction. The feathers though they're rounded are about five or six times larger than the circles. So we have a different scale there.

And the three different designs are working together to really bring some visual interest to a piece of fabric that was already beautiful, but it was just a piece of fabric. And now it's a gorgeous machine quilted quilt. I hope you understand how important the quilting is to the surface of your quilt. And that you've decided that it's really a good idea to practice machine quilting so that you too can call yourself a good machine quilter.