Hattie the Magical Unicorn: Part of Her Magic is the Machine Quilting

Hattie the Magical Unicorn by Krisanne Watkins is simply a magical quilt. Part of the magic stems from the fabric line, Unicorn Magic by Northcott, and the wonderful design and precise piecing by Krisanne. But now take a look at the machine quilting, which was done by Carole Lifferth—wow! Just WOW!

The quilt is in the Winter 2019 issue of Fons & Porter’s Easy Quilts.

Now let’s look at Carole’s machine quilting up close. I’m betting you’ll see why I think it’s so incredible. The unicorn’s body is quilted with lines that show her muscle structure. For her tail, mane, and horn, Carole simply stitched over the lines in the printed panel.

The clouds are lots of connected swirls. Carole outlined the printed stars and then added a few more stars to fill the background space, having a few “dangle” from the rainbow. The triangles in the first and the fourth border were quilted with feathers and the background is scallops.

For the pieced stars above and below the printed panel, Carole stitched loop-de-loops for the background and little feathers in the star points.

For the two narrow borders, she quilted scrolls with a straight line in between.

The outer border has wavy lines spaced by the change of colors in the fabric.

The quilting viewed as a whole makes this a spectacular quilt. I say, “Well done, Carole, very well done indeed.” Why did I show you the quilting on this particular quilt? Because I want to inspire you. Don’t wait until you have a quilt top with hundreds of tiny pieces to try show-quality quilting. If you do, you’ll probably be intimidated because you’ve never done really over-the-top quilting. But if you aim high on a simpler quilt, when you do make that masterpiece, you’ll be ready. Do you think you aren’t there yet? Would you like to hone your machine quilting skills? Here are a couple of good resources. Marianne Fons and Dawn Cavanaugh talk about machine quilting basics; thread, batting, backing, preparation and finally practice techniques in this video. And we also have our “Quilt It!” series for longarm quilters. Series 8 has so many wonderful segments: quilting leather with Cathy Wiggins, graffiti quilting with Karlee Porter, quilting the Dream Big panels by Hoffman Fabrics, thread painting, wholecloth quilting, feathers and so much more. Check it out! Until next time, Happy quilting!

Want to create this magical panel quilt? Hattie the Magical Unicorn, and other equally delightful quilt patterns, can be found in Fons & Porter’s Easy Quilts.