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 that whether simple or ...

Geoglyph is a large 120" wide x 12" tall extended-width design. Watch the video above for just one example of how to use this design file. I think you'll see how many permutations are possible!

For more information about extended-width designs, check out our blog post here.

You'll see this in the video, but when I imported the design, it was resized by Intelliquilter to have a row height of about 7". I scaled to 100% for the row height of 12" before I began placing the blocks. Make sure to maintain the ratio of the design to avoid distortion and clip or trim away the part of the design that's not needed when you actually quilt it out.

To give you an idea of the density of the designs at 12", the spacing of the lines ranged from 1/2" to 1", so there is room to scale up or down depending on the density you'd like to accomplish. The wholecloth baby quilt I stitched out shown above is roughly 43" x 53".

There's no backtracking and blocks do not have to be placed precisely unless...