Fiddlesticks Quilting

As you know, Butch and Sundance were holding Momcat's place at the sewing machine for when she felt like going back to do some more quilting on Fiddlesticks.

I thought I'd take you through an easy quilting technique. Experienced quilters will already know this trick, but some of you beginners may appreciate this.  It's especially helpful to those of us who do not use a long-arm machine. All piecing and quilting here is done on a Janome 6260QC.

For this quilt I wanted very simple quilting and at an angle to add interest to all the squares and rectangles in the piecing.

I decided to quilt at a 60 degree angle from the top and bottom borders.  First I found the 60 degree line on my ruler and laid that line on top of the border where I wanted to begin my quilting.

The secret tool is 1-inch wide masking tape. Blue painters' tape works great, too. I placed the tape at either side of the ruler, which happens to be 6" wide.

I followed that line all the way up to the next border area.



Now I'll sew on either side of the masking tape. The inner lines will be 6" apart, just as the ruler is. Here's how it looks after it's sewn and the masking tape is removed. TIP: Try not to sew on the tape itself. From experience I can tell you that trying to tweeze the tape out of those stitches is a real pain.

When I'm done following this part of the plan I'll then center a piece of masking tape at 3", precisely between the 6" space left open. Therefore, my overall quilting plan will be two lines 1" apart every 2.5".

Too much math for you? Don't worry about that part then. Just know that masking tape and a ruler will give you a perfect quilting line to follow without dealing with pencils, chalk or the quilting bar on your sewing machine.

Looks like Butch is ready to hold down some more tape.

Happy creating!

Piwacket