Long Arm Quilting Ideas

Kris’ Quilt

It started with a beautifully pieced wedding ring quilt from one of my clients who made this for her daughter who loves hearts. We originally planned to just quilt the white areas of the quilt, but when that was finished I realized the quilt need more so I quilted the individual pieces of the wedding rings with half-hearts.

Here are pictures of the quilt process in progression, and the quilted line decisions I made along the way. This is the beautiful quilt top, before quilting. Amazing piecing for these wedding rings, and love the calming color choices!

The center of each wedding ring is quilted with concentric hearts.

Partial and full hearts were added into the eclipse shaped formed by the overlapping rings on a wedding ring quilt. That is where we thought the quilting would end. But, looking at the back of the quilt, it needed more — wasn’t complete without more quilting.

Half hearts were added on the wedding rings.

Here is a close-up of the final quilting, that brought this quilt to life! Hearts and other designs are great longarm quilting ideas.

And, a picture of the texture the quilting added to the beautiful design — the full quilt on a bed. The quilt was pieced and quilted with love!

Here is the final quilt, with the binding.

Lane’s Quilt

I love to machine quilt! I love everything about it! I especially love watching a quilt’s depth and texture change as the quilting is added. Here is Lane’s Quilt!

Here’s the beginning.  A simple 9 patch quilt, beautifully pieced by Lane.

First step, quilt the solid blocks.

Second step, quilt the 9 patch. I like to use patterns that add dimension, but don’t outshine the piecing

Melody’s Quilt

Fabric artist, Melodie Bankers, usually sends me her quilt tops in the mail with a note including a general idea of what she’d like for the quilting – overall, custom, a general theme, etc. She will also include “or whatever you think will work for this quilt”.  I do long arm quilting for other people as a side job, and love the challenges!

For this particular quilt, she wanted an overall, edge-to-edge pattern with a feeling of leaves falling down from a tree and pooling at its base. I got my inspiration for the leaf shape by looking at the “bear paw” block that she pieced in the top. From there, I had a good idea of what I wanted the quilting pattern to be – a large leaf pattern with swirls to give the impression of leaves falling in the wind.

I had two choices at that point – I could draft a custom quilting design for this quilt, or find a pattern from a book or online. Since I already knew that Melodie wanted an overall pattern, I began searching for the perfect pattern for this quilt. I did not have what I wanted in my stock, so I looked online. There are several fabulous quilt pattern designers and I found just what I wanted at Urban Elementz. The only thing left to decide was what color and type of thread to use. This turned out to be the most difficult choice to make. With so many colors and values in the quilt, I needed a color that would blend with the darker fabrics, but still work with the lighter ones. In this case, the obvious color choice for thread was not the best choice. I tried many different green and green/blue threads, but none were close to being the right one. It turned out that a 50 weight, medium grey thread was the perfect choice.

Melodie’s quilts are always beautifully pieced, so the actual quilting was a joy!

Swirls are always a great longarm quilting idea.