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...

As part of the Longarm League membership, I recently recorded an interview/pantograph design brainstorming session with Tawny Oland of Simply Fabulous Quilting. Tawny's first pantograph release called Chunky Knit and can be purchased here.

Another League member named Tera Nicolo-Smith stitched out Tawny's Chunky Knit panto on a client's quilt. All the other details can be found here:

 

 

 

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A post shared by Tera Nicolo-Smith | Longarmer (@thequiltingsmith)

Tawny has been working on a new really awesome digital design and while we were discussing stitch path options and trying to "optimize" the design, we noticed that Art and Stitch swapped the start and stop points... without permission! How rude! I'm being dramatic, I'm sure it was something I did to cause the change, but I couldn't figure out how to switch it back.

Enter, Leisha Farnsworth of Quilting It. She's another incredible talent as a quilter...

I've been working on a special project with my guildmate Ben Millett. We both are members of the Central Iowa Modern Quilt Guild that meets in the Des Moines metro area.

You kind of just need to check out Ben's blog to get a sense of the caliber of work he creates and the intention behind his pieces. I always love to see the creativity he brings to modern quilting!

His piecing is just one layer of his finished work. He's someone who will bring the most meaning possible to each and every detail. The quilting design should be no different, right? Except, what is commercially available as far as LGBTQ+ affirming quilting designs? Ben wanted to change that, and he did so in the most personal way possible—by spelling out the most essential words of his message in his own hand.

I was just the digitizer for this project - the art is all Ben's. My part was to use my "special software" to create the files so that quilters everywhere can use them. I...

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...

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...

I was so honored to be a guest on Elizabeth Chappell's podcast called Craft to Career. Listen to the episode here.

Maybe this makes me a monster, but I really liked this episode! Am I allowed to say that allowed without sounding braggy? There was a time where it made me really uncomfortable to hear a recording of my own voice, but I guess I'm over that now that I'm 40. I really liked the questions Elizabeth asked and how the conversation flowed.

As she mentioned in the episode, we met each other at QuiltCon in Austin, Texas, in February of 2020—right before the world shut down.  At that point, I knew that we had memberships in common, so I immediately struck up a conversation. I had just started mine not quite 6 months prior and I was obsessed with trying to improve and grow the Longarm League (still am!). She had started the Quilters Candy digital membership by then, too, and so we quickly found ourselves comparing and contrasting our offerings, at one...

Have you considered digitizing quilting patterns?

Since the Longarm League began, many of our members have been curious about digitizing. How difficult is it? What is the process involved? How does one sell designs? 

In an effort to show my approach, I started recording my computer screen as I was working on my design that eventually became known as Peak Blooms. 

When I started this design, I didn't know where it was going to take me, and I'm pretty sure I would have scrapped it immediately if I could see into the future and know just how L-O-N-G it would take to tweak all of my blessed petals! 

But, I'm stubborn. "In for a penny, in for a pound", as they say! All told, I recorded about 10 hours of on-screen digitizing over several days. You certainly don't have that kind of time to watch it unfold, so that's why I put this video in hyperdrive to give you a look behind the scenes.

Luckily, most designs only take a fraction of the time from beginning vision...

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...

Shields is a digital pantograph design by Jess Zeigler (that's me!) for Longarm League.

I find myself frequently recommending pantos comprised of simple shapes, especially for quilt tops that have a lot of piecing, color, and/or fabrics. I find these simpler quilting designs to be the most versatile because they have a way of bringing calm and a cohesive element to a "busy" top. They lend beautiful texture without complicating the quilt.

This little motif reminded me of an abstract and somewhat asymmetrical shield. Or scales. Panning out and looking at the overall effect resembled a braid of some kind. 

As you can see from the video of the stitch-out at the top of this post, there is only a tiny bit of backtracking. When you set up the design in your computerized system, it does not need any offsetting.

When quilting this baby-sized sample approximately 45" x 50", I set the row height at 2.5" and used a...

Should you offer Custom T-shirt Quilt Services?

You have a longarm quilting business and someone asks you to make them a t-shirt quilt. What do you say?! 

Maybe you love tshirt quilts? Maybe you hate them. Feelings aside (but really, I would never tell you to put your feelings aside), does it make financial sense to add this service to your menu of offerings as a longarm quilting business?

Custom quilts or custom quilting can mean different things in different contexts. For the sake of this conversation, I mean "custom" in a start-to-finish way with specific materials (t-shirts) provided by the client. Custom here does not refer to a specialized kind of layout or that areas of longarm quilting are specific to certain areas of the quilt.  

I asked Longarm League member Kristen Lee of Mashe Modern for her perspective. Watch a clip from our call in the video player above.

Early on, when her hobby was just starting to morph into a business, Kristen made custom...