FREE MOTION MACHINE QUILTING

 While I enjoy hand quilting and learned to do it many years ago, it is slow. Now most of my quilts are finished by machine quilting.

While some are "quilted by checkbook", meaning I pay a longarm quilter to quilt them, most I quilt myself on my Bernina Q20 sit down longarm machine. Like with most things, the more you practice, the better you become.

2012, that's 14 years ago, I started planning and making a quilt for my 60th birthday, my "Diamond Jubilee". It is almost finished! I have written about this quilt a lot during those years, find one of them HERE.

This is the top before I started quilting it:

Some photos of the quilting:

As I worked on the various stars, I wondered what I could do in the wide paisley border. It needed a good bit of quilting but nothing would show up except for the "texture" given by the stitches. And there was nothing I could mark on this fabric that I would be able to see for quilting. 

By dumb luck at just the right time, I learned of Geraldine Wilkins' new ruler: Stitchline 3-in-1 Ruler Quilting Tool. I met Geraldine when we both taught at the Virginia Consortium of Quilters a few years ago. She knows her stuff and is an excellent machine quilting teacher. And she knows what makes a tool really great. The price was right, shipping was reasonable, so I ordered it. Timing was perfect, it arrived the day before I was ready to tackle those borders.

I wanted something curvy, fairly open, and the ruler had excellent markings to require no marking on the quilt itself. I was very pleased with how well it works and how the border looked finished:

Back showing the border quilting, a wavy cross hatch

Straight Line 1 Ruler--in addition to the curvy edge there is a channel for stitch in the ditch, and a straight edge with needle stops at both ends

The first pass--all curvy lines done in only one direction. After that was done, I decided it needed to be done in the other direction too.

Detail of quilting in the blocks--all done with rulers

Once this was quilted, the binding went on and I'm just about done hand sewing that in place.

On to the next one. The bins of four patches I make as leader/enders was overflowing so I looked for a block pattern to use some. I thought I liked this enough to make a large quilt but when 12 blocks were done I knew that was enough. I just didn't love it that much--this baby size was plenty:

The body of the quilt is quilted with a simple straight line cross hatch grid, using Geraldine's ruler. 

I want to get better at feathers and this was the perfect quilt for them--the busy border fabric won't show much and I was free to play with feathers. 

First I used another ruler I have with a curvy edge to quilt the spine of the feather plume. Then I drew lines on paper the finished size of the border, added that same spine, and drew the feathers with a pencil. This helped me see which way to quilt them and served as a reference as I was quilting:

All in all, I was pleased with how the feathers turned out:

From the back so you can see them

The front

Now I am hand sewing the binding in place and this will be done. Waiting for a baby who needs a quilt with a mother who likes old-timey fabrics. And I am still looking for a way to use the hundreds of four patches from bright fabrics:

I am enjoying online classes for free motion and ruler work quilting. Here is a little more from those:

Learning new designs will give me more options as I finish more than a few tops I have made.

Do you quilt your own? What is your favorite method?

Let's quilt.

Barbara