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Machine Quilting Small Projects – Part 1

Hi all! I will be traveling for the next few Mondays, so I thought it would be fun to re-run my machine quilting tutorials I have shared in the past. I myself do not machine quilt large (lap quilt and up) quilts on my home machine. but I quilt everything I make that is 40″ and under. That’s why I like to share my tips on quilting smaller quilts on your domestic machine. I have a mini video tutorial I have done as well that I will post next week.

This week, I will cover the steps I take to prepare the quilt top for quilting. These are my top tips. If you have some tips you’d like to share, feel free to leave a comment. It’s always a good day to learn something new! So grab that table runner you have waiting to have someone quilt, follow my tips and do it yourself.

Preparing the Quilt for Quilting

Step 1: You prepare a quilt for quilting by making what is called a quilt “sandwich” by layering your quilt top with batting and backing.

For quilting a small quilt, my first tip is to cut the backing and batting about 1-2″ larger on all sides than the quilt top (photo below). 

This guarantees that the whole quilt top will have all three layers to its edges as you quilt it. Backing and batting that is cut to the exact size of your quilt top can cause you to have parts of your quilt top with nothing underneath it if the top shifts during the basting and/or quilting process. If you end up with an area like this when you’re quilting, you will be spending time picking out machine quilting stitches… and no one wants to do that!

**Bonus Tips: For your large quilts you are sending to the long-arm quilter, be sure to ask them how much overlap of backing (and batting if you have to provide that) they prefer. 1 -2″ works for a small quilt top on a home machine, but larger quilts generally require more. I cut my backing  6″ larger on all 4 sides for a quilt that will go to my long-arm quilter. Also, if you need to seam together fabric for your backing, be sure to iron the seam open and flat to relieve bulk (photo below). This is a backing tip I received from my long-arm quilter.**

Step 2: To prepare your quilt top to be “sandwiched”, make sure all the seams are pressed flat, whether you press them to to the side or open. Flat seams make for a flat, less bulky quilt top for quilting. Also, remove any stray threads from the quilt top. Especially the ones that are in the seams. When you’re piecing a quilt top, threads often get caught in the seams (see circled areas in photo below).

These threads can get caught in your quilting foot and send you off course from your design. Or they can get quilted down into your motif and cause you extra work having to pull them out afterward.

Step 3: Next make sure your backing is pressed and as wrinkle-free as possible. Find a large table and tape the backing, right side down, to the table top to keep it smooth and tight without stretching it out of shape. Start on one side and make your way to the other side while smoothing out the backing as you go. If you are lucky enough to have a large, hard floor space to do this, that works too.

Once the backing is secured, lay the batting on top, smoothing it out. Be careful not to wrinkle the backing below.

Step 4: Center the quilt top on top of the batting and backing pieces. Smooth carefully so wrinkles are not created in the batting and the quilt top is not stretched out of shape. Use a ruler to make sure you did not stretch it out of shape. To do this, place the ruler on the corners as shown below. If the quilt top has not been distorted, you’ll have a nice 90 degree corner that matches the ruler.

Step 5: The final step in preparing the quilt for quilting is to baste it together to hold everything in place. You can either do that with thread or with safety pins.

  • Thread Basting Method: You can use white thread and a long running basting stitch in a grid pattern. Space the stitching 4 to 6″ apart. Start in the center of the quilt sandwich and work your way out. Since the stitches are long and widely spaced, you can clip and remove the basting from each section you are quilting as you go.
  • Pin Basting Method: This is the method I use. I pin 3 to 4″ apart, starting in the center of the quilt top and working my way out to make sure the quilt top remains smooth and flat. I also like to stagger the pinned rows (last photo) and I use curved safety pins made specifically for quilt basting.

So that is how you prepare your quilt for machine quilting at home. Now you are ready to head to the machine and quilt it!

Next week, I will share tips on the quilting process along with my mini video tutorial that demonstrates it. My main goal with this post and next week’s installment is to make machine quilting on your home machine a bit less intimidating.

See you next week & Happy Quilting!
Deanne

Machine Quilting on Your Home Machine – Part 1

Hi everyone! I will be on the road for a bit so I thought I would cover a topic I’ve done before: small project quilting on your home machine. For the most part, I hire out quilting on my quilts that are larger than 48 x 48″. My long-arm quilting friends, who quilt large quilts as a business, definitely do a better job on anything larger than that.

So, this week’s and next week’s posts will guide you through machine quilting those smaller projects yourself. I hope to give you the confidence to give it a try and have fun doing it! Read on for my tips. This week, I will cover how to prepare the quilt top for quilting.

Preparing the Quilt for Quilting

Step 1: To start, you need to make what is referred as a quilt “sandwich” by layering your quilt top with batting and backing. For home quilting, my first tip is to cut the backing and batting about 1-2″ larger on all sides than the quilt top (photo below). This guarantees that the whole quilt top will have coverage to the edges. If you cut the backing and batting exactly to the size of your quilt top and it shifts during the basting and/or quilting process, you can end up with an area along the edge of your quilt that does not have batting and backing. Believe me, you don’t want to pick out machine quilting stitches!

**Extra Tips: For your large quilts you are sending to the long-arm quilter, be sure to ask them how much overlap of backing (and batting if you have to provide that) they prefer. 1 -2″ works for a small quilt top on a home machine, but they generally require more. I cut my backing  6″ larger on all 4 sides for a quilt that will go to my long-arm quilter. Also, if you need to seam together fabric for your backing, be sure to iron the seam open and flat to relieve bulk (photo below). This is a backing tip I received from my long-arm quilter.**

Step 2: To prepare your quilt top to be “sandwiched”, make sure all its seams are pressed flat, whether you press them to to the side or open. Flat seams make for a flat, less bulky quilt top for quilting. Also, remove any stray threads from the quilt top. Especially the ones that are in the seams. When you’re piecing a quilt top, threads often get caught in the seams (see circled areas in photo below).

Step 3: Next make sure your backing is pressed and as wrinkle-free as possible. Find a large table and tape the backing, right side down, to the table top to keep it smooth and tight without stretching it out of shape. Start on one side and make your way to the other side while smoothing out the backing as you go. If you are lucky enough to have a large, hard floor space to do this, that works too.

Once the backing is secured, lay the batting on top, smoothing it out. Be careful not to wrinkle the backing below.

Step 4: Center the quilt top on top of the batting. Smooth carefully so wrinkles are not created in the batting and the quilt top is not stretched out of shape. Use a ruler to make sure you did not stretch it out of shape. To do this, place the ruler on the corners as shown below. If the quilt top has not been distorted, you’ll have a nice 90 degree corner that matches the ruler.

Step 5: The final step in preparing the quilt for quilting is to baste it together to hold everything in place. You can either do that with thread or with safety pins.

  • Thread Basting Method: You can use white thread and a long running basting stitch in a grid pattern. Space the stitching 4 to 6″ apart. Start in the center of the quilt sandwich and work your way out. Since the stitches are long and widely spaced, you can clip and remove the basting from each section you are quilting as you go.
  • Pin Basting Method: This is the method I use. I pin 3 to 4″ apart, starting in the center of the quilt top and working out to make sure the quilt top remains smooth and flat. I also like to stagger the pinned rows and I use curved safety pins made specifically for quilt basting.

So that is how you prepare your quilt for machine quilting at home. Now you are ready to head to the machine and quilt it! Next week, I will share tips on the quilting process and my mini video tutorial that demonstrates it. My main goal with this post and next week’s installment is to make machine quilting on your home machine a bit less intimidating.

Share your questions and tips below in the comments. If you are a home machine quilter, do you have some advice to share? I am going to do a drawing among the commenters for a pair of machine quilting gloves that I like to use.

The drawing will be from comments from this week’s and next week’s posts so it will take place on Monday, February 6th. **We have a winner… Congrats, Marsha Thornburg!**

Happy Quilting!
Deanne

Machine Quilting a Small Project – Part 2

Welcome back to part 2  of my machine quilting tutorial. Last week, I covered preparing your small quilt top for quilting on your home machine. If you did not read it, click here. This week it’s time to cover the machine quilting itself. I will share tips on choosing a design, practicing stitching, etc. At the end will be one of my mini video tutorials showing the technique. Now, these are my tips on my machine quilting technique. There are other quilt teachers out there who have tips on quilting small projects on a home machine. It never hurts to search them out too. More tips and information can’t hurt! 

Prepare To Quilt

Tip #1: First tip is to ready your machine and sewing area for machine quilting. It’s a good idea to have a large area to your left and behind your machine, especially if your project is a larger quilt. This will support the weight of the quilt to the side or behind your machine and cause less stress to your arm and shoulder muscles. Also, if you don’t support it, the weight of the portion of your quilt not being stitched can pull on the area you are stitching and created problems with your stitching and design.

If you don’t have a large table where you can set your machine, you can create this extra space by placing another table behind your sewing table or placing an ironing board there, lowered to the same level as your sewing table. 

Tip #2: Change your needle. Odds are, you haven’t changed it as often as you should. It’s best to start with a fresh needle when beginning a quilting project so you are assured there will be no fabric snags, larger holes punched in your fabric or snapping thread. All of these things can happen with a needle that has been used too much. I recommend switching your universal needle out with one that is specifically for quilting.

These needles are sharper than the universal needle to penetrate through the 3 layers of the quilt sandwich.

Tip #3: Use the right foot on your machine. I mostly do free-motion, meandering, machine quilting. For that, I recommend an open toe darning foot.

With this foot, you drop your feed dogs and move all the layers of your quilt sandwich with your hands. Dropping the feed dogs insures there is no drag on the bottom layer of your quilt sandwich while moving it. 

Now this is where you can look for advice from other machine quilters. They may recommend other feet to use. If I decide to do straight line quilting, like a grid or stitch in the ditch, I will use a walking foot. Here’s mine:

Special “teeth” on the bottom of this foot mimic the feed dogs under your quilt to evenly feeds all three layers of your quilt sandwich as you quilt. This helps also to eliminate puckers or rumples on the backing that you could get with just a standard foot on top.

If you do not have one for your machine, I recommend purchasing one. It will be worth it as you can use it for quilting and also for attaching binding evenly.

**I have just recently began to work with this kind of foot so I am not in a position to instruct you on this type of machine quilting, yet.  If you want some instruction for this type of quilting, there are many expert machine quilters you can find by a simple google search or a search on YouTube.

Tip #4: For the type of quilting I do – free motion with a darning foot – I recommend these quilting gloves:

These gloves help me grip and hold taunt the three layers of the quilt sandwich so I can move it as one under the needle.

Tip #5: This is a time-saver tip. Wind several bobbins with the thread you are using on the project so you can quickly change out a bobbing that has run out. 

Time to Quilt!

Tip #1: Prepare your design ahead of time. To decide what quilt design I want to use, I have a trick. I either print a copy of one of the quilt blocks in the quilt top or draw one out on a piece of paper. Once I do that, I will draw out a quilt design that I can follow on each block! Here’s an example below:

Once I have the design I like on paper, I use an erasable marking pencil to mark the blocks. The arrows on the drawing (I do not mark those on the quilt) are showing which direction to stitch in to make this design in one continuous pass. You can also just do an overall meandering pattern like this:

This overall pattern above is often referred as “loops and stars”. So whether you choose a custom design within each block or an overall motif, it’s good to decide before you have the quilt under the needle to save frustration. I have picked out machine quilted stitches before… and it’s not fun!

Tip #2: Practice quilting on a scrap sandwich. I still do this when it’s been awhile since I have machine quilted. Take two scrap pieces of fabric and sandwich them with a scrap piece of batting and use it to practice designs and the flow of the movement of the quilt sandwich with your hands. To make sure there are no skipped stitches, uneven stitches or “eye-lashing” of stitches on curves you need to match your stitching speed (speed of your machine) with your movement of the quilt sandwich.

Above is one of my recent practice pieces where I was trying out a “paisley” design.

Tip #3: Start quilting your project from the center, working your way out. That way any fabric that shifts will shift towards the edges of the quilt top and can be adjusted as needed instead of bunching up in the center.

Tip#4: Take breaks when quilting. About every 15 minutes of quilting, I stand up, stretch my shoulders and hands. You’d be surprised how tensed up your muscles get when you are quilting. If you take breaks to stretch, you will not fatigue quite so much.

Quilting Steps

 I will now describe the quilting steps. At the end of this post will be my mini quilting tutorial showing these steps.

  • The feed dogs on your machine need to be dropped. See your owner’s manual on how to do that if you have not done it before.
  • Next, pull your bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. To do this, put your threaded needle down in the spot where you want to begin and drop your presser foot. Tap your foot peddle so the needle comes back up, pull on the end of the top thread and this will draw the bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. This is so the bobbin thread does not get caught in the stitching on the back and create a mess!
  • Start with a few small “locking stitches”. Since your feed dogs are dropped, they are not moving the quilt sandwich …. you have to. So to make these small stitches, just move the quilt top slightly while stitching. Since you are only moving it slightly, the stitches will be very small.
  • Once you do these beginning stitches, you can now move on to the motif you have chosen. Be sure to move the quilt top at an even pace matching the speed of your machine. That is how you keep the stitches even (unless you are one of those lucky quilters who have a stitch regulator on your machine!).
  • Once you reach the end of your design or are at a place where you need to stop, end with a few small locking stitches again. Snip the threads as close to the quilt top as you can (be careful!). Now you are ready to move on to the next area!

Mini Tutorial Video

So here it is. My mini tutorial on the steps I described above.

Here are some of my quilt motifs:

That’s it! That is my free-motion quilting tutorial for quilting small quilt projects on your home machine. Leave a comment or ask questions below. You will be entered into a drawing for my pattern, Twinkle, Twinkle. 

The drawing will be on Monday, April 18th. Good luck!***We have a winner! Congrats, Sharon M!***

Happy Quilting!
Deanne

Machine Quilting a Small Project – Part 1

Welcome! I thought this would be a fun topic for the next few weeks. We have all struggled with getting our quilt tops quilted. If you have access to a lot of long-arm quilters in your area you are so lucky! But many of us are in areas where there are not a lot of long-arm quilters available. That’s my problem. Scheduling in a quilt takes some time because the quilters are so busy, especially if they are really good at it! I reserve using my long-arm quilter for my large projects. So what do I do? I quilt anything that is under 48″ x 48″ on my home machine! That’s why I decided to talk about quilting smaller projects on your home machine. Now, you may not want to set your maximum quilt top size as high as mine and just stick with quilting tops that are smaller. That’s up to you. For those of you who are up to the challenge, this is the series for you. So let’s get started!

Preparing the Quilt Sandwich

To start, you need to make what is referred as a quilt “sandwich”. Funny name… but this is what quilters call it when you layer your quilt top with batting and backing. When doing this, I like to cut my backing and batting about 1-2″ larger on all sides than my quilt top (photo below). This guarantees that my whole quilt top will have coverage to the edges. If you cut the backing and batting exactly to the size of your quilt top, you could accidentally shift things while basting and/or quilting and end up with an area along the edge of your quilt that does not have batting and backing. Believe me, you don’t want to pick out machine quilting stitches!

**Extra Tips: If you are not going to quilt your own large quilt, confer with your long arm quilter on the amount of overlap of backing they prefer. I generally cut a backing 6″ larger on all 4 sides for a quilt that will go to my long arm quilter. And if you need to seam together fabric for your backing, be sure to iron the seam open and flat to relieve bulk (photo below). This is a backing tip I received from my long-arm quilter.

To prepare your quilt top to be “sandwiched”, make sure all your seams are all pressed flat, whether you press them to to the side or open. Flat seams make for a flat, less bulky quilt top for quilting. Also, remove any stray threads from the quilt top. Especially the ones that are in the seams. When you’re piecing a quilt top, threads often get caught in the seams (see below).

Moving on, make sure your backing is pressed and as wrinkle-free as possible. Find a large table and tape the backing, right side down, to the table top to keep it smooth and tight without stretching it out of shape. Start on one side and make your way to the other side while smoothing out the backing as you go. If you are lucky enough to have a large, hard floor space to do this, that works too.

Once the backing is secured, lay the batting on top, smoothing it out. Be careful not to wrinkle the backing below.

Now, center the quilt top on top of the batting. Smooth carefully so wrinkles are not created in the batting and you do not stretch the quilt top out of shape. Use a ruler to make sure you did not stretch it out of shape. Place the ruler on the corners to make sure they are still 90 degrees and not stretched.

The final step in the sandwiching of a quilt is to baste it together to hold everything in place. You can either do that with thread or with safety pins.

Thread Basting Method: You can use white thread and a long running basting stitch in a grid pattern. Space the stitching 4 to 6″ apart. Start in the center of the quilt sandwich and work your way out.

Since the stitches are long and widely spaced, you can clip and remove the basting from each section you are quilting as you go.

Pin Basting Method: This is the method I use. I pin 3 to 4″ apart, starting in the center of the quilt top and working out to make sure the quilt top remains smooth and flat. I also like to stagger the pinned rows. I like to use curved safety pins made specifically for quilt basting.

So that’s the quilt sandwich. Now you are ready to machine quilt your project. Next week, I will share tips on the quilting process and my mini video tutorial. My main goal with this post and next week’s installment is to make machine quilting on your home machine a bit less intimidating.

Comment or ask questions below. You will be entered into a drawing for my quilt pattern, Twinkle, Twinkle!

The drawing will be on Monday, April 18th so you have 2 weeks to enter! ***We have a winner! Congrats, Sharon M!***

Happy Quilting!
Deanne

Machine Quilting Small Projects on the Home Machine – Part 2

Welcome back! Last week in the first part of this series, I covered preparing your small quilt top for quilting on your home machine. If you did not read it, click here for that post. So, this week it’s time to cover the machine quilting itself. I will share tips on choosing a design, practicing stitching, etc. At the end will be one of my mini video tutorials showing the technique. There are many online resources for learning to machine quilt, so don’t just rely on mine alone. Do a google search and you will find some very experienced quilters sharing their tips and advice also. So let’s go!

Prepare To Quilt

Tip #1: First tip is to ready your machine and sewing area for machine quilting. It’s a good idea to have a large area to your left and behind your machine, especially if your project is a larger quilt. This will support the weight of the quilt to the side or behind your machine and cause less stress to your arm and shoulder muscles. Also, if you don’t support it, the weight of the portion of your quilt not being stitched can pull on the area you are stitching and created problems with your stitching and design.

If you don’t have a large table where you can set your machine, you can create this extra space by placing another table behind your sewing table or placing an ironing board there, lowered to the same level as your sewing table. 

Tip #2: Change your needle. Odds are, you haven’t changed it as often as you should. It’s best to start with a fresh needle when beginning a quilting project so you are assured there will be no fabric snags, larger holes punched in your fabric or snapping thread. All of these things can happen with a needle that has been used too much. I recommend switching your universal needle out with one that is specifically for quilting.

These needles are sharper than the universal needle to penetrate through the 3 layers of the quilt sandwich.

Tip #3: Use the right foot on your machine. I mostly do free-motion, meandering, machine quilting. For that, I recommend an open toe darning foot.

With this foot, you drop your feed dogs and move all the layers of your quilt sandwich with your hands. Dropping the feed dogs insures there is no drag on the bottom layer of your quilt sandwich while moving it. 

There is another type of foot for quilting. If you are doing straight-line stitching or stitching in the ditch, it’s best to use a walking foot or “even feed” foot in conjunction with your feed dogs in place. Here’s a walking foot:

Special “teeth” on the bottom of this foot mimic the feed dogs under your quilt to evenly feeds all three layers of your quilt sandwich as you quilt. This helps also to eliminate puckers or rumples on the back that you could get with just a standard foot on top. 

(**I have just recently began to work with this kind of foot so I am not in a position to instruct you on this type of machine quilting, yet.  If you want some instruction for this type of quilting, there are many expert machine quilters you can find by a simple google search or a search on YouTube.)

Tip #4: For the type of quilting I do – free motion with a darning foot – I recommend these quilting gloves:

These gloves help me grip and hold taunt the three layers of the quilt sandwich so I can move it as one under the needle.

Tip #5: This is a time-saver tip. Wind several bobbins with the thread you are using on the project so you can quickly change out a bobbing that has run out. 

Time to Quilt!

Tip #1: Prepare your design ahead of time. Ever wonder what to quilt on a top? I have a trick I use. I either print a copy of one of the quilt blocks in the quilt top or draw one out on a piece of paper. Once I do that, I will draw out a quilt design that I can follow on each block! Here’s an example below:

Once I have the design I like on paper, I use an erasable marking pencil to mark the blocks. The arrows on the drawing (I do not mark those on the quilt) are showing which direction to stitch in to make this design in one continuous pass. You can also just do an overall meandering pattern like this:

This overall pattern is often referred as “loops and stars”. So whether you choose a custom design within each block or an overall motif, it’s good to decide before you have the quilt under the needle to save frustration. I have picked out machine quilted stitches before… and it’s not fun!

Tip #2: Practice quilting on a scrap sandwich. I still do this when it’s been awhile since I have machine quilted. Take two scrap pieces of fabric and sandwich them with a scrap piece of batting and use it to practice designs and the flow of your hand movement.

Above is one of my recent practice pieces where I was trying out a “paisley” design.

Tip #3: Start quilting your project from the center, working your way out. That way any fabric that shifts will shift towards the edges of the quilt top and can be adjusted as needed instead of bunching up in the center.

Tip#4: Take breaks when quilting. About every 15 minutes of quilting, I stand up, stretch my shoulders and hands. You’d be surprised how tensed up your muscles get when you are quilting. If you take breaks to stretch, you will not fatigue quite so much.

Quilting Steps

 I will now describe the quilting steps. At the end of this post will be my mini quilting tutorial showing these steps.

  • The feed dogs on your machine need to be dropped. See your owner’s manual on how to do that if you have not done it before.
  • Next, pull your bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. To do this, put your threaded needle down in the spot where you want to begin and drop your presser foot. Tap your foot peddle so the needle comes back up, pull on the end of the top thread and this will draw the bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. This is so the bobbin thread does not get caught in the stitching on the back and create a mess!
  • Start with a few small “locking stitches”. Since your feed dogs are dropped, they are not moving the quilt sandwich …. you have to. So to make these small stitches, just move the quilt top slightly while stitching. Since you are only moving it slightly, the stitches will be very small.
  • Once you do these beginning stitches, you can now move on to the motif you have chosen. Be sure to move the quilt top at an even pace matching the speed of your machine. That is how you keep the stitches even (unless you are one of those lucky quilters who have a stitch regulator on your machine!).
  • Once you reach the end of your design or are at a place where you need to stop, end with a few small locking stitches again. Snip the threads as close to the quilt top as you can. Now you are ready to move on to the next area!

Mini Tutorial Video

So here it is. My mini tutorial on the steps I described above.

Here are some of my quilt motifs:

That’s it! That is my free-motion quilting tutorial for quilting small quilt projects on your home machine. Leave a comment below to be entered into the ongoing drawing for a pair of Machingers quilting gloves!

The drawing will be on Monday, February 22nd. **We have a winner! Congrats, Sharon Aurora!**

Until next week… Happy Quilting!
Deanne

Machine Quilting Small Projects on the Home Machine – Part 1

Since I had a Facebook post early last week showing a small project I was machine quilting, I thought it would be a good time to do a blog post series on machine quilting small projects on the home machine. I’ll share some of my tips and at the end of next week’s post I’ll share a mini tutorial video I did demonstrating the technique. If you have never tried machine quilting on your home machine, perhaps this will give you the urge to try it. This week, we concentrate on getting the quilt top prepared for quilting. So let’s get started.

The Quilt Sandwich

To start, you need to make the quilt “sandwich”. Every time I say that, it makes me hungry….LOL! To do this, I like to cut my backing and batting about 1-2″ larger on all sides than my quilt top. This guarantees that my whole quilt top will have coverage. If you cut the backing and batting exactly to the size of your quilt top, you could accidentally shift things while basting and/or quilting and end up with an area along the edge of your quilt that does not have batting and backing. Believe me, you don’t want to pick out machine quilting stitches!

(**Extra Tip: If you are not going to quilt your own large quilt, confer with your long arm quilter on the amount of overlap of backing they prefer. I generally cut a backing 12″ larger on all 4 sides for a quilt that will go to my long arm quilter.)

If you need to seam together fabric for your backing, be sure to iron the seam open and flat to relieve bulk.

Now, you need to prepare your quilt top to be “sandwiched”. Make sure all your seams are all pressed flat, whether you press them to to the side or open. Flat seams make for a flat, less bulky quilt top for quilting. Also, remove any stray threads from the quilt top. Especially the ones that are in the seams. When you’re piecing a quilt top, threads often get caught in the seams (see below).

Moving on, make sure your backing is pressed and as wrinkle-free as possible. Find a large table and tape the backing, right side down, to the table top to keep it smooth and tight without stretching it out of shape. Start on one side and make your way to the other side while smoothing out the backing as you go. If you are lucky enough to have a large, hard floor space to do this, that works too.

Once the backing is secured, lay the batting on top, smoothing it out. Be careful not to wrinkle the backing below.

Now, center the quilt top on top of the batting. Smooth carefully so wrinkles are not created in the batting and you do not stretch the quilt top out of shape. Use a ruler to make sure you did not stretch it out of shape. Place the ruler on the corners to make sure they are still 90 degrees and not stretched.

The final step in the sandwiching is to baste the quilt top. You can either do that with thread or with safety pins.

Thread Basting Method: You can use white thread and a long running basting stitch in a grid pattern. Space the stitching 4 to 6″ apart. Start in the center of the quilt sandwich and work your way out.

Since the stitches are long and widely spaced, you can clip and remove the basting from each section you are quilting as you go.

Pin Basting Method: This is the method I use. I pin 3 to 4″ apart, starting in the center of the quilt top and working out to make sure the quilt top remains smooth and flat. I also like to stagger the pinned rows. I like to use curved safety pins made specifically for quilt basting.

So that’s the quilt sandwich. Now you are ready to machine quilt your project. Next week, I will share tips on the quilting process and my mini video tutorial. Leave a comment and you will be entered in my drawing for a pair of machine quilting gloves!

The drawing will take place on Monday, February 22nd, so you have two weeks to enter. Until next week…. **We have a winner! Congrats, Sharon Aurora!**

Happy Quilting!
Deanne

Machine Quilting Tips for Small Projects

I like to machine quilt my small projects on my home machine. For me, I consider “small” anything about 48 x 48″ and smaller. You may decide what you consider small to differ from my idea. For anything larger than my size parameter, I hire a long-arm quilter to do the job. It’s easier for them to work on the larger projects because they have those large machines, of course! Anyway, I thought I’d share my tips on preparing a quilt top for machine quilting.

Tip #1

To make my quilt sandwich, I like to cut my backing and batting about 1-2″ larger on all sides than my quilt top. This guarantees that my whole quilt top will have coverage. If you cut the backing and batting exactly to the size of your quilt top, you could accidentally shift things while basting and/or quilting and end up with an area along the edge of your quilt that does not have batting and backing. Believe me, you don’t want to pick out machine quilting stitches!

If you need to seam together fabric for your backing, be sure to iron the seam open and flat to relieve bulk.

Tip #2

There are a few steps to prepare your quilt top before “sandwiching” it. Make sure all your seams are all pressed flat, whether you press them to to the side or open. Flat seams make for a flat, less bulky quilt top for quilting. Also, remove any stray threads from the quilt top. Especially the ones that are in the seams. When you’re piecing a quilt top, threads often get caught in the seams (see below).

Tip #3

When starting the quilt sandwich, make sure creases and wrinkles are ironed out of the backing. Find a large table and tape the backing, right side down, to the table top to keep it smooth and tight without stretching it out of shape. Start on one side and make your way to the other side while smoothing out the backing as you go.

Once the backing is secured, lay the batting on top, smoothing it out. Be careful not to wrinkle the backing below.

Finally, center the quilt top on top of the batting. Smooth carefully so wrinkles are not created in the batting and you do not stretch the quilt top out of shape.

Tip #4

Now it’s time to baste the quilt top.

Method #1 – Thread Basting: You can use white thread and a long running basting stitch in a grid pattern. Space the stitching 4 to 6″ apart. Start in the center of the quilt sandwich and work your way out.

Since the stitches are long and widely spaced, you can clip and remove the basting from each section you are quilting as you go.

Method #2 – Pin Basting: This is the method I use. I pin 3 to 4″ apart, starting in the center of the quilt top and working out. I also like to stagger the pinned rows. I like to use curved safety pins made specifically for quilt basting.

Once the quilt top is basted, it’s ready for quilting! Like I said earlier, this is the way I prepare to machine quilt my small projects. There are many, many great resources for machine quilting. Try my tips… try other’s tips … try mine and other’s together. This will help you to find the right way for you!

I will cover the actual machine quilting in next week’s post. Comment below on some of your favorite machine quilting tips, and/or what you think of mine, to be entered into the ongoing pattern drawing for my pattern Warm & Wooly Welcome.

The drawing will be on Monday, March 2nd. Until next week…

Happy Quilting!
Deanne

***We have a winner! Congrats, Debbie Gross!***