How to Quilt>Quilting Designs

Your Quilting Stitches Can Create Beauty
in your Quilt

Who Else Wants to Sew Beautiful Hand Quilting Stitches Effortlessly?

Give Me 10 Minutes and I will Show You How to Make Your Hand Quilting So Memorable that Your Family and Friends will be Talking about Your Stitches for Years

hand quilting

Are you confused about how to place your quilt in a hoop for hand quilting? Have you read the tips for how to "rock" your needle, but it just doesn't make sense?

In this DVD, you will learn:

how to place your quilt in a hoop (I did this wrong for years!)
how to hold your needle
how to guide your needle through the quilt layers
your choices of quilting needles
your choices of quilting hoops

And, you can watch as many times as you want to, conveniently on your TV or computer.

Tell Me More - - -

Q: How do you choose your design for quilting on a quilt?

A: The other reason for quilting on a quilt is to make a great design and enhance the beauty of the quilt. (The first reason is to hold the layers of the quilt together!)

Click on the image of the quilt to see a more detailed picture of the quilting design in the muslin Snowball blocks.

My experience is that when you have a solid fabric or a relatively simple quilt design, having extensive quilting adds a lot to the quilt.

The quilt on the left has several large areas of muslin, which are perfect for placing some fancy quilting designs.

On the other hand, because the blocks between the muslin had print fabric and a lot of pieces, I simply quilted "in the ditch."

This was a quilt I made several years ago, and it was early in my quilting adventure. Today, I might do something different in the Tennessee Waltz blocks.

Click on the image of the quilt and you will see a more detailed picture of the quilting design in the muslin Snowball blocks.

This quilt has a medium amount of quilting.

A Requirement for a Lot of Quilting?

The Floating Blocks Space Quilt on the right required some massive quilting. But because the fabric was dark and busy, the quilting can barely be seen.

This quilt has extensive quilting that you can't see. The quilting was necessary to keep the layers of the quilt together. Click on the image of the quilt to see a close up of some of the quilting around a box.

Originally the quilting plan was to quilt a "sun" and rays starting at the center of the top of the quilt, making that be the light source that created the illusion of dimension in the floating hollow cubes.

As you can imagine, the quilt was pretty easy to quilt, and it was finished relatively quickly. Because it has 100% wool batting (from the mid-1980s - that can't be washed), it was intended to be a wall hanging.

The background is one solid piece of fabric with the blocks inset in their spaces.

Once I hung the quilt on the wall, the fabric in the places between the quilting hung out like little balloons, and I realized that it would only get worse with time.

The only solution was to quilt it more. And because of the theme of the quilt, I decided to have a lot of fun with it.

There are all kinds of little space-like quiting designs quilted in it, and if I had used white or silver thread, the quilting would have shown up on the front.

Because of the gold stars and wanting the focus to be on the boxes, I decided to use black thread which shows up on the back - since I used a white fabric for the backing.

Click on the image of the quilt to see a close up of the quilting around one of the boxes.

Much of the quilting was simply meandering stitches to fill in the space. This quilt was quilted about every inch.

Quilting to Highlight a Design

If you have an interesting block design, or if you are doing appliqué, your quilting stitches can make something either stand out or fade into the background.

This applique quilt uses quilting designs to enhance the texture of the quilt. Click on the picture for a closer view of the quilt.

One of my all time favorite quilts was made for my daughter, Stephanie’s, 5th grade teacher and her new baby.

Stephanie liked the picture on a thank you card, so we decided to make a quilt using the design.

The fabrics are mostly hand dyed, and relatively solid. The pattern in most of the fabrics is created from the variation in the dying. We used quilting stitches to get some texture and an idea of the various feathers, fur, spots, etc. on the animals.

Looking back at the Space Quilt, I used quilting stitches to make the blocks stand out, and the more intricate quilting stitches to make the rest of the quilt fade into the background.

This leads into the second question: What kind of stitching can be done on a log cabin quilt?

Like so much in quilting – you can do pretty much anything! But, that’s not really too helpful.

This quilt was quilted around the heart shape and tulips to make those stand out from the rest of the quilt.

The thing about log cabin quilts is that there are tons of patches – which means lots of seams, and usually fairly small expanses of fabric. Generally the logs in a log cabin are 1- 1½” wide, which doesn’t leave much space for fancy quilting designs without crossing a lot of seams.

While stitching across seams is not difficult, sometimes it interferes with the flow of the quilting design.

To keep it relatively simple, on log cabins, I usually stitch in the ditch.

Sometimes I have added a second row of quilting 1/8” – 1/4 ” away from the first row. Or, if your log cabins make a definite design, such as a heart, you could quilt around the pattern, leaving the actual pattern unquilted so it will stand out.

Then quilt fairly heavily between each of the patterns, so they recess into the background.