Quilting Tutorials — FMQ

How to Combine Quilting Designs With so many different quilting motifs available, it’s hard to decide which ones to use and how. With custom quilting, we now have to decide on multiple quilting designs to use on our quilt top. When using multiple designs, how do you decide which ones will work together and how to combine the different elements? This week we dive into techniques you can use to discover how those elements will interact with each other and different ways to combine them to create multiple outcomes.   When deciding how to combine different motifs, I start with...

Did you start FMQ on a regular machine? Is that the best way to try out FMQ? I did. I actually learned Free Motion Quilting right after I made my first quilt. The very first one I did, I hand quilted, but then knew I wouldn’t get far if I kept doing that (it was a baby quilt and took me 2 1/2 years to finish). My mom had recently taken some free motion quilting classes and showed me what she had learned, so I tried it and was hooked from the beginning. I have quilted every quilt I’ve made....

What is the most common thread you use when there are a lot of color changes in the top? And bobbin? I am not one to constantly change thread color (unless that is what a client requests). I’ve found, that for the most part, the quilting blends well enough that I can use the same color.  For example, my Christmas Whirl quilt (the first photo) was done completely in white, regardless of the bold red, greens, and yellows. Currently I use Glide 40 wt in most of my quilts, top and bottom. 95% of the time, if I have white...