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Leafy Bloom Digital Quilting Design

 

 

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...

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What are Extended-Width Digital Quilting Designs and How Do I Use Them?

While this type of design is not new, we as quilters may not see extended-width designs often. However, they seem to be trending in popularity as of late. Unfamiliarity with these kinds of designs can lead to avoidance, which is a valid reaction. But, as the market grows with beautiful and creative new extended-width designs, I'd like to provide some information so that you don't have to miss out on using them. 

First, we'll look at what an extended-width design is, we'll discuss some advantages and disadvantages of the designs, and then at the end, there'll be a list of video tutorials so you can learn best-practices for setting them up with your own software.

What Is an Extended-Width Digital Quilting Design?

To answer this question, let's first look at some "typical" edge-to-edge (E2E) designs that we most commonly buy online and use in our computerized longarm machines.

Above are some of my own designs with varying degrees of complexity. I wanted to show...

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Megan Ellinger of Tiny Orchard Quilts

Megan Ellinger—a member of the Longarm League—asked if she could interview me for her YouTube channel, and I heartily agreed! Her YouTube channel and business name is Tiny Orchard Quilts.

Most of our members provide longarm quilting services to clients, so I was intrigued about her business model as it's a bit more "non-traditional". Naturally, I asked if I could also flip the tables and interview her for a behind-the-scenes look at her business. She agreed and we had so much fun having two back-to-back and totally different conversations about quilting and the business of quilting! 

The interview that we recorded for her channel went live last week, you can watch it here. We covered a lot of ground! Her audience had a lot of great questions about what it's like working with a longarm quilter such as typical costs and turnaround times, and we talked about the League itself, including our Rookie Season course. Megan even did the...

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Friends of P Digital Pantograph Quilting Design

 

 

The Longarm League's latest digital pantograph release is called Friends of P. Yes, it's a strange name for a digital pantograph design, but it's also the name of a quirky and catchy song from the mid-nineties by a band called The Rentals. Watch the video here and I'm so sorry if it gets stuck in your head!

I hope it's obvious as to why Friends of P came to mind when I was trying to name this design. My maiden name starts with a P also, so I guess I'm partial to the letter.

 



There is certainly a "mod" vibe to this design as well, so keep it in mind for your grooviest, mid-century-looking tops! :) 



This sample quilt size is approximately 45" x 50". For a reference in scaling the design, the pictures here show a 4.0" row height with a gap between rows of -0.396" which created a pattern height of 4.396".  

There are some small areas of backtracking, back-stitching, over-stitching, whatever you want to call it, but...

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Kernels Digital Pantograph Quilting Design

 

 

I'm an Iowa girl and corn on the cob is in season, and so I feel like this design was inevitable. It seemed appropriate to release to the Longarm League as a bonus this month (August of 2021).

Sometimes, I look back at my own hand-guided quilting for inspiration when I'm trying to come up with new digital designs. I'm talking about the days before I had my computer and this would have pre-dated my Intelliquilter by a few months.

I designed and made the quilt shown here with my guild-mates from the Central Iowa Modern Quilt Guild. It was for the QuiltCon charity challenge and the picture was taken while it was still in my studio in January of 2017. I added the corn on the cob-themed quilting to the gold background areas and added basting stitches to the white and gray areas so that my friend Riane Menardi Morrison could hand quilt it. Why did I go "all in" on the corn idea? The block that we experimented with in the quilt is called the...

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What are clients willing to pay for quilting?

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...

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Changing the Start and Stop Points in Art and Stitch

 

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:



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...

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Pride Digital Pantographs

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...

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Together Digital Quilting Design

 

 

 

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...

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Glancing Digital Quilting Pantograph Design

 

 

 

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...

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