Creative Evolution: Longarm Quilting Comes of Age

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In the space of one generation—which seems more like the space between one breath and the next—longarming has moved from the realm of designer workrooms to people’s homes. Because once quilters got a hold of the longarm machine, the creative possibilities flourished.

Dawn Cavanaugh, APQS Education Director and award-winning longarmer, stumbled into longarming more than 25 years ago. Here, she talks about the pioneers in the industry, how things have changed and continue to change, and the excitement of seeing someone who “just wants to get their quilts done” blossom into a truly artistic longarmer.


“I bought my first longarm in 1994,”says Dawn Cavanaugh. “About 26 years ago, if my math is right. So I started when machine quilting was considered ‘cheating.’ It was an uphill battle to get it accepted.”

At the time, Dawn was mostly interested in getting her quilts done. “Pushing those fat quilts though that little machine—ugh,” Dawn says. “After a sore neck and sore back, I said ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ That’s when I started researching”

She grew up across the street from the APQS factory (“Never dreaming that I’d spend most of my adult life working for the company!”), which at the time manufactured longarms for industrial applications like furniture manufacturers. Back then, they were used primarily for upholstery in designer workrooms, and were “driven from the back,” tracing along paper pantographs.

This young quilter is tracing a pantograph (a line drawing), while the machine stitches the design onto the fabric from the front.

The cloth would be loaded to the front of the machine, and then the operator would go to the back, tracing an edge-to-edge design off a 12-foot length of paper. Now, huge quilt heads stitch designs onto bales of fabric in a fraction of the time. 

Dawn says, “The daughter of one pattern maker described how early pantographs were made. Her dad would lay a stencil over a 12-foot long piece of paper, then spray it with ink and let it dry. That’s it, that’s the way it was sold.” 

A few people would trace designs onto copy paper, make copies, and then tape them together that lay on the table of the longarm.

The revolution started with a light bulb moment when someone decided that instead of driving from the back, they’d try driving from the front, “drawing” freehand. 

Driving from the front of the machine started a freemotion revolution.

“And, guess what? You don’t have to follow along a pantograph,” says Dawn. “It opened the door wide for quilters to do something other than generic edge-to-edge cloud patterns. These amazing feathers started happening.”  

In the mid-1990s, there were a few pioneering quilters exploring the new realm of longarming. Dawn mentions Marcia Stevens, of Brainerd, Minnesota, who started the first machine quilting showcase in Duluth. The Machine Quilter’s Showcase, in its heyday, was the destination, and the teachers there rose to prominence quickly.

Dawn mentions Linda Taylor as an inspiration for many quilters in the early days. Pam Clark, another teacher, was well-known for teaching quilters how to use the bones of the quilt to guide the motifs—shooting for corners instead of marking designs, for example. Marilyn Badger is another pioneer who is still out there winning major awards (just recently, Best in Show at the 2020 Road to California for her quilt Christmas in St. Andrews).

“I became known for teaching background and filler designs,” says Dawn, “My personal niche was giving people the basic foundation—you can’t build a house without a good foundation. Learning good technique gives you skills that will stand the test of time. “

Dawn’s classes on fillers and backgrounds proved popular. Laying a foundation of practical designs and solid skills is critical to success as a quilter.

For more than 25 years, Dawn has been teaching longarming at conferences and in classrooms, and has distilled those foundational elements into her APQS certification course. “From my experience teaching people, I know that what people say their goals are will shift as they learn. For many beginners, the first words out of their mouth are, ‘I just want my quilts finished.’ They’re happy with edge-to-edge and pantographs.”

As the popularity of longarms increases for home use, classes fill up… And quilters leave happy.

As they learn, the shift comes, and they begin to let their creativity come out. “So many students, once they get their hands on the machine, they get away from the fear—which is the biggest thing holding them back. Then their tastes change,” Dawn says. “As their confidence builds, they realize they have the ability to make something special, and they will start putting in more time than they do for a picnic quilt or football stadium quilt.“ 

“Computerization has taken longarming to a whole new level,” she says. “Some people, again, think it’s cheating, but really it’s just another tool for getting it done. That darn computer can do things way better than I ever could as hand quilter, but a quilter still tells it what to do.“

Computerized quilting has unleashed new levels of creativity.

Conversely, there are those quilters who claim they can’t quilt at all without a computer. “That’s not true; there are all kinds of tools that can help them make amazing designs, even without a computer” says Dawn. “We used to use the lid from the  Blue Bunny ice cream buckets for circles, and a 2 x 4 to do straight lines. Stitch regulators didn’t exist, so you had to not only be adept at creating a design, you also had to move the machine at a consistent speed or your stitches would be crazy.”

Rather than ice cream bucket lids and 2 x 4s, longarm quilters today can use rulers design specifically to work with a machine’s hopping foot.

Times are changing. The bucket lids and 2 x 4s have been replaced with rulers designed specifically for longarms. Now, machines can come with black lights for seeing tone-on-tone threads, and stitch regulation is the norm. People are learning from classes online (like Dawn’s certification course), and there’s a new generation of quilters pushing boundaries. “People like Bethanne Nemesh, Angela Walters, Gina Perkes—they’re bringing show quilting to the next level,” says Dawn.

“Now that longarm quilting has become mainstream, we’re moving into new realms.”

It’s an exciting time to become a longarmer!

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  1. Love the stars and stripes quilt in the background? Is there a pattern? I can draft it myself but would like to give credit to the designer.