Straight and Narrow
- Krista Moser
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Over the years, I've received many comments and questions about my straight-line quilting technique. This is a question I often get when doing trunk shows, and I try to describe it while showing the quilts, but I've never done a blog showing my process.
So, I spent a little time filming my straight-line quilting in action. I quilt almost all my quilts this way, it is super easy and fast! I do this style of quilting on my longarm, but you could do the same style on a domestic machine if you used a free-motion foot or a darning foot.
Here, you can see the video I did showing one row of quilting on the baby quilt from a blog I did, Just Four Fat Quarters. I fill in each triangle, sweeping up and down across the space to fill it in. I keep going into the next triangle until the whole row of triangles is done.
Once it was all quilted, this is the back and front of that same quilt. You can see from the back that the triangle blocks connect to each other, so the quilting creates a diamond grid from the back.
This is my Honeycomb Hexagon pattern. The blocks are all hexagons, and you can see how I fill in each block with straight lines curving around at the top and bottom to go for the next pass. I try to mount the quilts on my longarm in such a way that I can go from one hexagon block right into the next without stopping.
In the case of my Fall Foliage quilt, I did up and down lines in all the hexagon leaf blocks. Then, I quilted side-to-side lines in all the fill-in triangles between the hexagons. It looks like the same texture, but the change in direction adds a little fun detail.
My longarm is very old and does not have a stitch regulator or any computerized functions, so I freehand everything. I shoot for about ¼” spacing between my quilting lines, but they are probably closer to ⅜” apart. If you look closer, you’ll see they are not perfect, and I hope that encourages some of you! Don’t be afraid to try 🙂
Happy Sunday, everyone.
Krista