McTavishing Free Motion Quilting Techniques

I was recently sent a book to preview and I am so thrilled with this book. Karen McTavish is a quilt instructor. She does a lot of long arm, but a lot of domestic as well. She has a whole lot of whole cloth quilts as well. I have been taking a few lessons from her for the long arm.

My long arm is computerized, and I've wanted to do more of my hands on free-motion quilting. And so I had called her to ask her if I could have a lesson and she had told me that this new book was coming out and she wanted me to give it a shot first. I have been so impressed with this new book. I'm going to give you just a very short insight into the book, and I'm sure you're gonna be really excited about it as well, because it's just opened up the whole world to me as far as quilting. The first thing that Karen tells us to do is she tells us to get a piece of scratch paper.

Well, what I did was I went out and I bought myself a nice little sketchpad because I wanted to have some feel to it as I was working with it. I wanted it to be substantially steady and firm. Now she tells us that what she wants us to do is just to go ahead and draw a couple lines. So I'm just going to draw some lines, and there's no rhyme or reason to them. Now, the thing about McTavishing is it's repeating, it's echoing.

It's a really cool design because you can make mistakes and they're not going to show up. This quilt that I've laid out is my very first project. And I just gone in and decided that I've always had a little bit of a fear about it. I was just going to put it on the machine and I was just going to start and finish. And that's exactly what I did.

And it was really a lot of fun to do. It was very freeing. It's a quilt actually for my granddaughter. And so it's a very special piece as well for me. I started here on paper though.

One of the things that Karen really likes to do is she likes to just follow... and you can just keep coming down and maybe do a little tear drop here. And then, you know what, maybe another tear drop right here. And maybe I'll keep continuing with that in this section. And there's no rules you can do as many as you want, as far as echoing.

Echoing is when you go around whatever it is that you've just done. I think maybe what I want to do now is go in a different direction. And this is one of the things that she teaches you is that's okay. And because I'm up here, I do want to fill in this area down here. So I'm just going to continue to fill it in and I'm just going to carry it across.

And then I could start a whole nother design. I think I'm going to just do a little bit of a swirl and maybe another swirl up here. And in this area, I think I'm going to do a little teardrop. So you see, nothing is planned that I'm doing. I am just continually going.

I did this for hours on end and I could do it for hours on end here showing you. But I'll show you some of the work that I did. This was a really fun piece for me to do. Here you see just a little, this is called ribbon candy. She shows you all of these within her book.

These are just little round circles that I've put in. I just drew a heart and then just echoed around it. Here truly is just a lot of McTavishing, going in different directions and echoing. It doesn't have to be really close. It doesn't have to be really tiny, as you can see, but it can be.

And I started with just a few lines. So once you've gone through and you've done it on your sketchbook, then what you're gonna do is you're going to want to start doing it on fabric. "Easier said than done," a lot of you are thinking, I know. Now if you're doing it on your domestic machine you want to have these. These are little gloves, they're called machingers.

And they come into a pack. These are a little bit dirty because I've used them quite a bit, and this is actually washed, but the dyes from fabric will come off on them. So don't be alarmed. It won't come off on your fabric that you're using, but it helps you to push your machine around. Now, if you're going to be doing it on a domestic machine you have to remember to lower your feed dogs.

A lot of people have been asking, "Well, I don't even know where to begin. "How do I put fabric together?" Well, you won't put fabric together to begin with. What you're going to do, and by fabric I mean big pieces of fabric, you're going to cut squares. And this is just a square of fabric, a square of batting, and another square of fabric. I like to iron them together because that usually will hold them together.

And then you have, this is what we call a sandwich. And once you've got that then what you will do is you will take your sandwich to the machine and you will start to quilt it. And you don't have to worry about being jerky, or not being as smooth or going over another line. Don't worry about any of those things. Just go in and have fun and create.

As you can see, I started out with one of my lines across and actually this is one of my lines down, but you can't tell. And here's another line down, because of the way that I kept adding in you can't tell where those lines are. Here's a finished project that I had done. Front or back, it looks good either way, which just really surprised me because I am not a person that felt like I could do this type of work. As I completed this project, it made me so excited.

I had to come and share it with you. But I also need to share one more thing with you about this wonderful book. There are two DVDs in it and you can do projects along with Karen. It was wonderful! There's also a lot of pictures that are of other artists that have tried her technique on whatever it is that they have done.

So you'll see a lot of her work within this book, a lot of instruction, and this is just beautiful here. A lot of ideas that you will be able to use on your own projects. I wouldn't just walk out to the store, I think I would be running right now to pick up this book.