How to Machine quilt (an overview)
There are so many different ways to quilt a quilt. This how-to is going to focus on doing edge-to-edge quilting because when I machine quilt, it’s my go-to approach and there are just so many possibilities!
Materials
Basted quilt sandwich, marked for quilting
Walking foot attachment for your machine
Thread - I use 50 wt thread when machine quilting, but you can explore other weights (I’d always test them first on a scrap quilt sandwich to see how they look). One thing NOT to use is “quilting thread” as that has often been pretreated with a coating to make it easier to hand quilt and that coating will gunk up your machine!
Rules-of-the-road/The Highlights
Regardless of what pattern you go with, there are a couple rules to the road for machine quilting.
First: you’ve got to use a walking foot. This will help feed all three layers of the quilt through the machine consistently. If you don’t use one, the backing of the quilt is going to be pushed through a lot faster than the top and it’s just going to get real messy, real quick.
Second rule of the road: go slow. It is so tempting to go fast, but I promise you, it never pays off! If you can slow down your stitch speed on your machine, do so. As you get the hang of things, you can speed up a little bit, but channel your inner tortoise instead of the hare for all machine quilting!
Third rule of the road: if you’re doing grids or crosshatch or any repeated parallel lines, you want to stitch all your lines in the same direction! If you alternate, you’re going to get bubbles in your quilt top.
Fourth rule: when starting and stopping, you’re going to want to drop your stitch length down to like .2 or .5 for a handful of stitches before resuming your quilting at your quilting stitch length (for me, that runs the gamut from 3 to 3.5). This will help anchor your quilting lines. Now, honestly when I’m feeling lazy, I’ll just do a couple backstitches at my regular stitch length at the beginning and the end instead of playing with my stitch length: since I’m quilting from one edge of the quilt to the other, these stitches will be covered and locked down by my binding at the end.
How-to Machine Quilt
Make sure your quilt sandwich is basted and you’ve marked your quilting lines. If you need help with either of those preparatory steps, you can read more about basting here and marking your quilting lines here.
Attach your walking foot to your machine
I pick a line towards the center of the quilt and will work my way out to one side before completing the other half
I gently roll up both sides of the quilt on either side of the line I am going to start working towards so that I can easily move the quilt through the machine
To start, decrease your stitch length down to like .2 or .5 for a handful of stitches at the edge of the quilt (or the “top” of the line). This will help anchor your quilting lines and since we’re doing edge-to-edge lines, these little anchor stitches will be hidden by the binding when you’re all done
Increase your stitch length to about 3 to 3.5 (or play with your decorative stitches on the machine! This zig-zag stitch was made by increasing the width of the design as far as it will go (my machine at home goes up to 9) and adjusting the stitching length to 2.75-3).
Slowly stitch along your quilting line
Once you get to the other end of your quilting line, drop your stitch length down to like .2 or .5 for a handful of stitches at the edge of the quilt (or the “top” of the line).
Do not rotate your quilt top! Instead, repeat step 5-8 with the next quilting line, starting at the same edge as you did with your first line. Note: I typically do the line to the right of the previous one as I can slowly unroll the quilt top that is in the harp of the machine.
Once you’ve quilted this half of the quilt, start on the other side, again, always going in the same direction as that first line (if you started by stitching the right half, then you’ll now have to keep rolling up the quilted portion into the harp, but I find this easier as you’re not dealing with safety pins this time around)
If you’re creating a crosshatch pattern, then once you’ve done this set of lines, it’s time to complete the grid! I’m a bit less fussy about where I start since the quilt is generally well secure at this point, but always ALWAYS keep all parallel lines stitched in the same direction!
Recommended Reading
If you’d like to learn more about machine quilting with your walking foot, make sure to check out WALK by Jacquie Gering as it is a phenomenal resource and just chock full of inspiration and helping hints and how-tos.
Next Steps
Once your quilt is quilted, it’s time to finish it up: read more about how to bind your quilt, starting here.