3D Quilting Session 6: Machine Quilting Tips

As with any quilt top, once you've made it, you need to layer it, and we need to do some quilting on top. What I wanna talk a little bit about with our 3D optical illusion quilts is how we want to do our quilting so that it still maintains that optical illusion look to it, and we don't just flatten it out and make it look two-dimensional. So, again, we have our blocks that we've made, and you can see here's blocks here, and if you think about visualizing what an actual block looks like just sitting on the ground, you know that this is one side and it's going away from you this direction, one side going away from you this direction, and then you have the top. So what I'm gonna do, just sort of as an example of some really easy quilting, is just some straight line stitching on the sides of our block. Now, I went ahead and just did some stitch in the ditch quilting all the way around our blocks, just to eliminate the need to have any pins basting anything or holding anything in place right now. So you can see I've just stitched all the way around all of those shapes and everything is just held in place. But you can't really see anything. So, if that's all you wanted to do, and you were fine with how this looks, you could do just that for your quilting. But if you wanted to add something more to the front, I'm gonna show you just a couple options for this. Now, a lot of people like to do free motion quilting. You can use your free motion foot, and you could come in and you could do a bunch of lines. Now, you could use a ruler and a pencil and draw your lines on there if you really wanted them to be straight. You could do free motion if you didn't care if they were a little wavy, and do that. I personally like straight lines. So I - that's what I want, but I don't wanna have to draw on my quilt top because I don't necessarily wanna have to wash it as soon as I'm done to get those lines out, I just wanna be able to hang it up and use it, and so I don't wanna have to do that. So I'm going to use, this is just an open toe presser foot. And so, why I wanna use this one is it has the open toe, so it's really easy to see where I'm going with my stitching, but it also has the edges of the presser foot, and I can use that so while I'm stitching, I can line the edge of my presser foot up along the edge of my shape, and then maybe the next row I move it over and I'm gonna align the edge of my presser foot up with a line of stitching I just did, and so on all the way up my block, and that is going to allow me to have nice, straight lines, I didn't have to do any marking on my quilt top but I still get the look that I wanted. So I'll show you what I mean by that, we'll just do a couple of lines of stitching. And I'm just going to pick this little block to start with just because it's in the middle and I think it will be easy to do. So I've got my foot on. Gonna kind of fold up this edge, get out of the way, and move this quilt under here. So what I'm gonna do is, again, I'm lining the edge of my presser foot up, edge of my presser foot up with the bottom of my shape here, and all I'm going to do is run a line of stitching, okay, and you can... Get my thread there out of the way. Just go right along the edge, right like this. And I have left my feed dogs engaged, everything, because I don't want to have to be moving it by myself using the free motion. If I drop the feed dogs, I would have to be moving the fabric under the presser foot, since I'm going in a straight line anyway, it just makes sense to leave those feed dogs engaged. Now what I wanna do, is I'm going to be working on the next side of my block, so I'm going to rotate my fabric, my entire quilt, again, I have my edge of my presser foot lined up along the side of my block, and I'm going to stitch this way. And once I get to the crease of going to the next block, I can do the same thing, pick it up and I can move it over, keep it lined up along the edge of that block, and just keep going. So if you think about it, I'm kind of doing a - maybe a little Chevron pattern, but I'm following right along the lines of the shapes that I've already created with my blocks. I'm just gonna take this off real quick so you can see what it looks like. Gonna trim these threads, 'kay. So you can see, right here in the middle, if I went along and did some quilting, just kept going up with my lines, that that would still maintain my shape that I want, or the look that I want for my 3D. So now I'm gonna do what I'm gonna call some wrong quilting, that I will eventually take out, that I don't want on here for my final project but I want you to see what it would do to the quilt if you did stitching going in the same direction across both of these sides. So I'm just gonna run a line of stitching right along the middle here so you can see what that looks like. Bring this back over. And again, I'll pretend I'm starting on the edge as if I was before, and I'll go ahead and just do some stitching. And this could be, you know, maybe you're doing straight lines like I am, maybe you decided to do some sort of free motion design all the way across the front, anything like that, but if you do something like this, across the top of your quilt, just trim this so you can see, you can already see how, because I have a line going in the same direction across both these, this block no longer has that 3D look to it that it does if you keep that shape going. So whatever kind of quilting that you decide to do on this, whether you're doing straight line quilting, whether you're doing some free motion, keep in mind what your block looks like, the directions that you want your lines to go, so you don't end up undoing your 3D look. So, that's just to give you an example of what that would look like. I'll go ahead and take that out before I do anymore quilting on this one, but just keep that in mind, when you're quilting on top of your tumbling blocks quilt. Now I'm gonna bring over our other optical illusion 3D quilt, because it's the same idea. So, what I wouldn't wanna do on this one is, if I have some quilting on this square, I can have quilting on this square, but I don't necessarily want this quilting to fall into this square, because I still want them to look like they're two separate entities, because they're supposed to look like they're on two different planes. So, I'm actually going to just do some, again, I can just do some straight line stitching on this one, I'll do that really quick, and then show you some lines where you should stop, and then show you what it looked like if you extend your lines too far. I'm gonna go ahead and do it on this small one in the corner 'cause it's the easiest one to start with. So, just do some lines, I can decide I wanna do maybe a sort of spiraling stitching in. I could turn it, go around, like so. And I can keep folding this up. This is the one thing that's nice about a really small quilt is you can do all sorts of turning directions, still being able to use your feed dogs, still being able to allow your machine to do most of the work for you, and you can still fit it all the way around on your throat plate without having to have a big machine. So, keep going like this. Could go all the way around, just doing spirals going around in there. But whatever quilting I wanna do, I want that quilting to stay within this square and don't feed over into that. Again, I'll show you what it would look like if you stitched directly from one square to the other square and how that's going to sort of ruin our 3D look. Just run a line of stitching across there. And you can see how now this square, it goes from looking like one is sitting on top of each other or maybe they're sitting different distances apart, and now they look like they're on the same plane again. So just like with your other one, no matter what kind of quilting you're doing, make sure you're keeping in mind what your pattern looked like to begin with when you were assembling it, what you're trying to achieve with how your blocks or how your squares are set, and that your quilting accentuates that rather than takes away from or ruins any 3D look you were going for. So, when it comes to these, you can see there's a lot of open space, a lot of different quilting you can do, you can do a bunch of designs, free motion, wherever you want, just make sure you're keeping your overall design in mind when you're quilting these.