I feel like I owe you an explanation for the name of this design. That will be coming soon.

But first, I thought I'd tell you the inspiration behind it. Back in December of 2021, Josh and I were watching the series called Landscapers that had recently premiered on HBO. It is based on a crime set in the 1990s in England. The series is visually moody, drab, and dark. There's a scene in an upstairs bedroom that had deep red, ornate wallpaper and I found myself asking Josh to stop and go back to a frame that showcased the wallpaper better. 

This is what caught my eye.

While it's definitely not the same, this was my first sketch from the inspirational wallpaper:

After playing around with the design a number of times on my reMarkable tablet, I slowly let the feathers get plumper and more prominent as part of the design, allowing me to fill in the space more evenly while keeping the floral center.

Here's how the design evolved as I was sketching:

When it comes to feathers,...

The first question I'm going to ask is: Are you making it easy for quilters to hire you for longarm quilting services? What might be holding them back? How can we overcome objections to hiring you?

I recently asked my Instagram audience from my @threadedquilting account: If you're a quilter who has never hired a longarm quilter, why not?

I left the question open-ended and collected responses for the 24 hours the Instagram Story was live. I got some interesting responses!

The top reason given was that the quilter wanted to do it all themselves from start to finish. I was actually surprised that this reason ended up being the top response! But I also understand this thinking. Personally, I fall within the same category. I've never hired a longarm quilter because I have always really liked the quilting process myself and wouldn't want to "outsource" my favorite part!

The remaining reasons for not hiring a longarm quilter were varied but fell into another nine categories.

This is where I want...

Instead of a soulless (😂) solid sample quilt, I'm so happy to share the special quilt I made for my new niece, Kate! 

It had been such a long time since I'd done any sewing. I really love the entire quiltmaking process, so it was fun to get out the rotary cutter and domestic sewing machine again and work on something new.

And what better reason than a new baby in the family?

I "kept it simple" by deciding on a classic sawtooth star quilt. I picked fabrics from my stash and used the same fabric for my background throughout the quilt. I didn't need instructions because I've made this star so many times in the past. I did make myself a general "map" as I was cutting fabrics and making my stars. Feel free to use my decidedly unfancy pattern:

 If you need a little more to go on than this, google sawtooth star, you'll likely find hundreds of patterns/tutorials.

Can we talk about the quilting already?! Ha - as a longarm quilter, it's my favorite part of the process.

I des...

I love feathers. 

I took my first quilting class in 2005. Not a piecing class, an honest-to-goodness beginner's machine quilting class that taught things like which materials to use, how to baste, and how to {start to} free-motion quilt.

In that class, we saw examples of real-life quilts that had been quilted. Our instructor passed around even more books of incredibly inspiring quilting. I fell for hard for feathers right then and there!

This was also the class where I heard ladies talking about long arms and I just nodded along, not having any idea about what that could be referring to. 😂

Basically, I've loved feathers ever since, in all kinds of iterations. I practiced drawing and quilting them until I got it down pat. I started out being truly the worst at it! It's not a natural thing—knowing how to create feathery shapes. Thank goodness for books and (much later) YouTube! 

As for this design, I wanted to make minimalistic-looking, plump feathers that are easy to ...

Early on, when we were just starting to offer our Rookie Season course, we had a student mention that she did not have to pay sales tax on her longarm machine because she had a business with an EIN already established when she bought it.

Cue the record scratch! 

I don't remember ALL the details of buying my longarm machine (it had been nine years prior), but I definitely remember paying sales tax on it. I would have had a sales tax permit at the time, too, I just didn't realize I could've used it to get an exemption on paying sales tax in my state. I bought my machine used without a computer, so this would have "only" been a savings of ~$700, but STILL! That money could have been put to good use applied to other start-up costs. 

The more I started asking around within the Longarm League community, the more I realized that this is a legitimate thing and available to more of us than I realized! I even called a machine manufacturer to discuss, just to make sure it was valid and legal. :)

It d...

For this new design, I wanted to explore a geometric and simplified version of a flower. In general, I'm not into flowers or gardening, so I really have no idea if it looks like anything existing in nature. Also, please don't hold that against me! It feels like I'm violating a sacred quilter's code or something. Quilting and gardening seem to go hand in hand.

What I do really like, however, are simple repeatable shapes. I like the way the texture can recede into the background and be present, even when it doesn't have to be the star of the show.

Another thing I try to watch for as a designer is that the quilting is evenly spaced, giving a nice uniform texture to an edge-to-edge design. It's the little things like this that make me happy! 

This sample quilt size is approximately 45" x 50". For reference in scaling this design, the pictures here show a row height of 3.5". If you include the gaps between the rows, the total pattern height would be 4.167". That would mean t...

From a longarm quilter's perspective, there can be a lot of fear and anxiety in what to charge clients, especially if you are just starting a business. I was right there, too, especially at the beginning of my journey.

I just looked back at some of my invoices before I got my longarm. I started taking on miscellaneous sewing projects in 2007, and I charged someone $120 for making a twin quilt on my home sewing machine. This project would have required me to buy the fabric, batting, and thread, baste the layers on my kitchen floor with a lot of safety pins, free motion quilt it through the small throat space, trim, make and apply the binding... the whole shebang. A small saving grace is that it was a whole cloth quilt (no extra piecing required) made with solid fabrics (less expensive than some designer prints) with a simple meander requested as the quilting motif. The project cost me probably around $60 in materials (buying retail at the store with no wholesale accounts), which would...

Meet the digital pantograph design released to the Longarm League membership in July of 2021. It's called Together.

I work on a lot of designs—sometimes many at once—and can't always remember what my inspiration or motivation behind them was, but I'm pretty sure this was started after seeing some wallpaper on Pinterest that I really liked. That's not the first time that's happened, either. It turns out wallpaper really gets my creative juices flowin'!  When I nested the repeating rows together, I saw the possibility of them appearing to intertwine, and I was really into that idea.

I could see this design working well on a modern quilt top, and/or perhaps one with a lot of negative space - the texture really looks great!

This sample quilt size is approximately 45" x 50". For a reference in scaling the design, the pictures here show a 3.0" row height with a gap between rows of -1.167" which created a pattern height of 4.167".  

There are some small areas of backsti...

I get naming fatigue when I'm working on lots of pantograph designs, often at the same time. I like to have practical names so that I can remember essentially what they look like without opening the files, but then those names don't often translate well to the marketplace.

This is one of those designs that I really can't recall what it started out being, but after I saw "snake eyes" I couldn't really see anything else. Longarm League member Lin Miller suggested the name Glancing in our Slack channel and immediately I knew that it was a better title than Snake Eyes.  Or maybe I should have cut right to the chase and named it Kaa after the character in Jungle Book. 😁 It wouldn't be the first time a design of mine inadvertently took on the shapes of animated Disney characters. 

What I DO remember about this design is that it's easy to stitch out with no backtracking. Huzzah! 

When setting the design up in a computerized system, it does require every other row to be offs...

I was so mesmerized by how this design was stitching out that I didn't realize I'd forgotten to record a snippet of the stitch path until I was on the last row! Oops! The video of the final row stitch-out is available at the top of this post.

What I really like to show in the videos is how any backtracking happens. As a designer, I try not to use backtracking too much, but it's also unavoidable at times. So, yes, there is some backtracking in this design, but it's not too intense. If it helps me accomplish a pretty result? Sign me up! I'm okay with that.

The upside-down clamshells are staggered a bit—one higher than the other on the repeat—so that you can set it up on your computer without offsetting. Once the rows are placed, you'll want to nest the rows closely, but they shouldn't touch. The space between the rows will give a little bit of margin and help hide any inconsistencies during realignment. It needs to be close, but placement does not have to perfectly meet the prior ro...