Extended Width E2E Designs in Intelliquilter | No Fuss Orange Peel by Julie Hirt

Have you ever bought a digital quilting design and Intelliquilter freaked out when you set it up using the pantograph function?

Maybe resulting in a screen that looks like this?



Instead of the design file consisting of a single motif that gets repeated like this:

an extended width design or full-row design looks like this in your Pattern Selector screen.



In this case, the repeats are already built into the design, and you just need to place and repeat the rows.

To repeat and place the rows, you need to use the Block Pattern feature and NOT Pantograph when setting it up. In fact, you'll get the un-quiltable display of red lines (shown in the first photo) as the software will attempt to repeat/tile the 100"+ segment both across and down the quilt parameters you've set.

 The video at the top of this post will take you through the way I set up extended width designs using No Fuss Orange Peel by Julie Hirt as an example. While the design is traditional, the way it stitches out is unique! 

If your machine refuses to go in the right-to-left direction without having thread breaks, I've included a demo in the second part of the video (at the 7:45 mark) showing how to use your IQ tools to split the pattern and change the start and end points to only stitch this design left to right.

Can we just acknowledge that names for digital quilting types are confusing?! There's edge-to-edge (E2E), point-to-point (P2P), and border-to-border (B2B) and some can fall in multiple categories. All of the designs I'm referencing in this post are E2E designs, the distinguishing factor is whether the design is repeated side to side or if it's already the full width. The good news is that I've been quilting and even designing these types of files for years without having to know how to categorize them!  The biggest struggle has come from not knowing how to categorize them for the purposes of this blog post. I want to use the right terms so that this info will be searchable via google. :)

When I recorded the video above, I thought for sure the No Fuss Orange Peel by Julie Hirt would be considered B2B, but now I'm not so sure.

I trust the info in the FAQ section of the Urban Elementz site under the heading Digital Quilting Info, which reads:

B2B (border to border) designs have the start and stop points at the outer most edges of the design, AND the design will completely fill the space top to bottom.

There is no interlock side to side OR top to bottom on B2B designs.

I'm not exactly sure what is meant by interlock. A design like Orange Peel does need to align with the rows above and below to complete the design but would guess that since it doesn't need to be nested together with a negative gap, it's not technically interlocked. And when the definition refers to a B2B design completely filling the space top to bottom, does the definition fit even if the rows are only 3.5" tall? If you have a strong opinion about this, I'd love to hear from you!

In the Longarm League shop, we currently have two such designs that are extended width designs, and I believe they'd also be considered both E2E and B2B. They are Love Code and Geoglyph. This is what Geoglyph looks like:

The portion in red is the design that measures 120" wide by 12" high and is not meant to repeat side to side within the row. Rather, you would trim off the portion of the row you don't wish to use. Here's a video showing the different variations of how this design can be used.

Modern Curves by Anita Shackleford is an example of a very popular extended width design. If you click on the link above, you can see that the Modern Curves, Modern Dew Drops, and Modern Serpentine designs show a full quilt's width. The height of these designs can also vary but for the most part would represent the height of one pass that a longarm quilter could quilt without advancing. I would have guessed that these would be described as B2B designs, but Modern Curves and Modern Serpentine interlocks top and bottom, which seems to be outside of the definition of B2Bs. See what I mean? Confusing!

As long as you know how to use these designs, I'm pretty sure the quilt police will leave you alone... even if you don't get the categories right all of the time. I asked members in the Longarm League for help because the only term that made sense to me was "full-row" designs. Kim R. saved the day by sharing the term "extended width"! I was able to find this on two other websites, so I'm going with it! :)