Saturday, February 20, 2010

How to machine quilt a motif

So, you want to quilt African Animals in your quilt border?

Get on the internet or into your child's colouring books. You are looking for simple, single line drawings. Resize the picture(s) to fit your border and play with the design until you can follow the whole design with one single line. This may take many tries and multiple draftings. Persevere!! You will get there.

Copy the designs on any kind of paper. I photocopy - it's quick and accurate.

Pin the designs where you want them. In this example I pinned all the designs before I loaded the quilt on my machine. That was the only way I could keep the spacing I wanted.

Keep the pins out of your way and stitch through the paper. Slow your speed down so you can stay fairly accurate.

Gently tear off the paper. If you hate paper piecing you will hate this too.

I filled in between the designs with some 'grass' and 'trees'.

After tearing paper, picking off paper and scratching off paper I end up using a skinny tweezer to get the itsy teeny bits left over.

3 comments:

  1. What a great idea, thanks, I'll be trying this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing this technique - you have certainly added some wonderful quilting designs to this quilt.

    ReplyDelete

Please - share your wisdom...