My Favorite 11 Quilting Tips

[This blog post is written by me, Julia Wachs. I do not use AI to generate text.]

Despite calling ourselves quilters, it's pretty common for us to outsource the actual quilting of our quilts to longarmers. I like to do this myself sometimes, but living in Spain now means that I don't have easy access to longarmers like I used to. I prefer not shipping my quilts unless required, so I've been doing my own quilting on my domestic machine or by hand.

Many of these tips are preparation related and apply to both machine and hand quilting.

TL;DR: Take your time!!

Julia's top tips for enjoyable quilting:

1. When piecing your quilts, backstitch at all seams that you know will be on the outside edges.

2. Take your time basting. Find a flat and clean surface and ensure that there are zero wrinkles. This should involve pressing your entire backing piece thoroughly. 

3. Sew baste if you have the time. I find this basting technique consistently gives me the best results. See my tutorial here: TUTORIAL

4. Before starting, clean out your machine and install a fresh needle. Check your machine settings and sew some test stitches on a scrap quilt sandwich.

5. When planning your quilting, think about how the quilt will be used. For example, I find that if I sew vertical lines on a quilt destined for a bed, the action of pulling up the covers results in popped stitches due to too much tension on the seams. I prefer to use on-the-bias quilting lines on bed quilts for this reason.

6. Have quilting plan. Lately, for me, this has meant taking a day to mark out my designs since I'm trying to branch out more from my beloved crosshatch pattern! I enjoy flipping through WALK and WALK 2.0, both written by Jacquie Gering, to get my creative juices flowing. My most recent walking foot quilting project was my Modern Botanical Sampler quilt where I used the orange peel motif.

7. Use quilting gloves to increase your grip and keep your shoulders down and relaxed. We don't want to be sore at the end of the day!

8. If sewing lines, always sew in the same direction to prevent rippling/puckering from the direction change. Fabric will naturally shift when pressure is applied, and usually that puckering spot ends up smack dab in the middle of the quilt. An illustration of this rippling phenomenon is below.This also means that your entire quilt will have to fit through the throat space of your machine. Roll your quilt as tightly as possible so that the quilt can fit through the throat space easily. I don't recommend doing this for a queen sized quilt or larger if you have a machine with a small throat space. I did that once and it was a battle.

9. If sewing in straight lines, use a walking foot appropriate for your machine. This really does make a significant difference in preventing the amount of fabric shifting that occurs.

10. Always keep the weight of the quilt supported when quilting. You should never be tugging or pushing the quilt through the sewing area. The quilt should move solely from the movement of the sewing machine/walking foot. 

11. Go slow! I set a speed control on my machine for slower than usually. You want to maintain control at all times.

Any tips I missed? Please let me know as I always love to learn something that made a difference for you.

Please share with a friend if you found these tips useful!