Photo courtesy of Gigi Levsen.

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Free Motion Quilting Tips and Techniques

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Free motion quilting is a fun, economical way to finish quilt projects on your home sewing machine, but it is difficult to do well unless you practice regularly. While there are many free motion quilting tips out there, I think there’s just one that really matters: you have to just do it (often badly at first). Then as you keep going, you naturally improve. I love free-motion quilting for small projects like pillow covers, since it’s a good way to get your practice in, but it’s not overwhelming and there’s not a huge, heavy quilt to maneuver, which can be physically difficult to keep in the correct place as you move it around.

free motion quilting tips
Step 1: Pencil and paper practice is necessary.

Just like athletes and other sporty people warm up before they get into the real exercise, so must you warm up and prepare yourself for free motion quilting. If you want to use a specific quilting motif on your project, practice it first with pencil and paper! This helps your brain remember the flow of the pattern so it becomes second nature as you’re quilting. I’m planning a floral-ish design to quilt over a bouquet of flowers. After a few iterations I landed on one I think will work (the one on the right).

Practice, Practice, Practice

When you’re confident on paper, get a practice sandwich of fabric and batting first, rather than starting to stitch on your real project. Now you can warm up on the machine and start putting these free motion quilting tips to use!

free motion quilting tips
Try cursive letters to get into the groove.

A helpful tip is to pull your bobbin thread to the top of the quilt sandwich, so it doesn’t get tangled up underneath. Try to use the same thread on the top and in the bobbin to avoid tension issues. And lower your feed dogs!

free motion quilting tips
Pull the bobbin thread up before you start.

Some quilters set their stitch length to 0” rather than lowering the feed dogs—experiment to see which you prefer. On the practice sandwich, warm up and get used to the free-motion feel by stitching the alphabet in cursive. This gives you a sense of how fast to move and how the process feels.

Practicing my floral motif before I try it on my real project.

After your alphabet warm up, practice the motif you plan to use on your project. I did that until my bobbin thread ran out.


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Let’s Quilt!

After the warm up, it’s time to go ahead and start on the real project. I’m stitching my floral motif right over my pieced bouquet of flowers (get an in-depth look at this project, and learn how to make your own, in the March/April 2023 issue of McCall’s Quilting).

free motion quilting tips
I’m going to stitch flowers on these flowers!

Since the prints and piecing are pretty busy, I’m not overly concerned with perfection — it won’t really be noticeable at a distance.

free motion quilting tips
Finally, it’s time to quilt the thing.

I started in one corner and stitch until I’ve covered the whole area.

Flowers are done! I’ll do the rest with my walking foot.

I’m planning to quilt the remainder of this piece with straight line quilting using my walking foot, so I’ll do that later.

But Wait, There’s More…

Another fun free motion quilting tip I like is to use a patterned fabric on the wrong side, and you can use the printed pattern as a quilting design for the front! This works both as a practice exercise, as well as for final projects (you may want to start with something small and go bigger once you’re confident).

free motion quilting tips
Try tracing the lines of a print to create a new, unique quilting design.

I practiced this technique using a circular print (not on a final project, thank goodness) and I thought I was doing OK until I finished, looked at the wrong side, and realized I forgot to lower the feed dogs this time.

free motion quilting tips
Let this serve as a reminder to lower the feed dogs every time.

My stitches look a little glitchy as a result. Whoops! Let my mistake be your lesson. It’s important to remember that this technique means your bobbin thread is what shows on the face of your project and to take that into account when planning to use decorative threads.

Center Motifs on Back and Front

My next project for free motion quilting is a little pillow cover in Christmas fabrics. I just wanted to get it quilted, so I can slap on an envelope backing and perhaps get a head start on next Christmas’ gifts.

Why not get this out of the UFO pile?

I wanted to use part of a panel print’s motif as my quilting design but I needed to align the centers of the motif with the center of my pillow front. To address this, I used a pin to line everything up, then pinned my layers together.

I used a pin to align the centers of the front and backing.

Then I started stitching over the printed lines in the center and worked my way out, eventually using specific points on the panel print as guides for my stitching, since the printed lines faded out.

free motion quilting tips
Stitching the pattern on the backing.

And before I knew it, my entire Christmas pillow was quilted! It’s not perfect but with the combination of busy prints and piecing, it hardly matters.

free motion quilting tips
It’s not perfect but it’s done and that’s close enough!

Unless someone is paying you for quilting or you’re entering a big quilt show with cash prizes, perfection is not necessary, in my opinion. Done is preferable to perfect.

free motion quilting tips
A cute little flower hides in the center of the pillow.

It’s nice to see how I got the centers to line up, even if you have to look super close to see it. And the quilted pillow is not only cute, it’s complete! I can just put a couple of flaps on back and stuff a pillow form in there.

Repeat as Needed

We hope you take these free motion quilting tips to heart! Every time you start a session, make sure to practice, warm up, and consider use print backings to add unexpected style to your quilts. The more you actually work at free motion quilting, the better you will get — happy quilting!

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