A Quilted Hug (revisited)

I blogged about this quilt last week and have received so many questions that I thought a second blog post may be needed.

Here are a few of the questions I received:

Just curious, why didn’t you quilt the words first to insure spacing and blending into the circular pattern?

Since I quilt on a longarm, the way that I go about quilting a quilt is different then if I was doing it on my home sewing machine. I load the quilt, and work from top to bottom, instead of from center out. It is easier for me to quilt the top, along each of the sides and then the bottom leaving the center unquilted. If you were doing this on your sewing machine, it would be much easier to do the center words first and then fill in around them.

After I quilted the verse, I filled in around it with the circular quilting design to make sure that there were no blank spaces.

Why didn’t you just load the quilt upside down and quilt it all from the back?

When using a quilting machine, the back of the quilt must be bigger than the top. This allows room to pin the backing onto the machine. Since neither Shea nor myself knew that we were going to be doing it this way, the pieced portion of the quilt (the top) was smaller than the back.

How long does it take to load a quilt?

There are so many products available to help load a quilt quickly, however, I just use pins. Since I have had just a little practice loading quilts, I am pretty quick at it. Of course it depends on the size of the quilt, but this seeing squares quilt only took about 10 minutes to load.

Did you mark the words before you quilted them?

I wanted to make sure that the verse was centered on the quilt as much as possible so I wrote out the words using a water soluble marking pen.

How did you prevent tucks in backing since you left it unquilted?

If I am leaving a large space unquilted, I always baste it with lots of pins. I pin it with the pins parallel to the bar on my quilting machine so that they can be rolled up with the rest of the quilt.

I think that about covers it! I love talking about quilting so if you ever have any questions about anything that I discuss, please feel free to comment!