By Diane Harris, HQ Stitch Brand Ambassador

I’m learning so much about machine quilting each day. The lessons apply whether you’re quilting on a domestic like HQ Stitch or on a stationary longarm like the HQ Capri. Some of them would also be useful if you’re longarm quilting with a machine on a movable carriage.

My Christmas Album, made by Diane Harris. Design: Tina Curran.

I wrote about quilting My Christmas Album in the last post, and today I want to dive deeper into some big lessons I learned on this quilt and talk about how hard it can be to know what you should quilt.

In other words, do you need geometric shapes or should you outline the patches, can you quilt right on top of the applique, should the quilting be dense or sparse, and so on.

As I considered the blocks, there didn’t seem to be a lot of space for quilting. I stippled a couple of the blocks but I wanted to be more creative on the rest.

I outlined the gingerbread men loosely.

I meandered a large stipple over the trees.

A smaller meander worked between the poinsettias.

I curled in and out of the snowflakes. These ideas aren’t horrible but they’re not great, either. I am hoping that knowing what to quilt will improve with practice.

One other problem presented itself. I made a plan for quilting loosely around the gingerbread men.

However, I hadn’t planned for how to travel from one to the next. You can see on the left above my wiggly line as I tried to travel. And under his arm, you can almost feel the panic as I ran into a roadblock and didn’t know where to go.

Lesson 4

Trouble comes when I don’t know where I’m going.

I must have a plan for what to quilt but also for how to travel around the quilt.

And that leads into another lesson.

Lesson 5

Stop. STOP! Sooner, not later.

I tend to blunder forward, adding bad quilting and making the problem worse. The more I blunder, the more quilting there is to remove later. I’m learning to stop as soon as I sense trouble.

As for this little quilt, while I struggled mightily, it is finished. And in my book,

Finished is better than perfect.

And now because machine quilting is finally FUN, I’m off to quilt the next one!

See the HQ Capri stationary longarm.