Custom Digital Quilting with Q-Matic: The 1984 Sampler Quilt Continues

 Happy Easter and Passover to all those celebrating this weekend!  I quilted this block over a week ago and wanted to jot down what I learned before I completely forget what I did.  Doesn’t the green airplane look great with the swirly computerized quilting design in the background, but not crossing over the airplane itself?

Q-Matic Masking Tool for Airplane Block

Of course there are quilters out there who could freehand quilt those swirls and spirals just as beautifully as the computer, but sadly I am not one of them.  ;-)  Since a computerized long arm machine is like a talented but blind quilting assistant, it’s necessary to precisely program and “mask out” the areas where you do and do not want the design to be stitched by physically moving the machine along the patchwork seams and clicking at the points to map out boundaries that the computer can follow.  This is a slow process, as I learned when I did it on this earlier block in the same quilt:

Also Done Using Q-Matic Masking Tool

Looks great, but I learned a lot about what NOT to do with that block!  I set up that circles and spirals as a repeating design right across the block as though it was an edge to edge design going across a whole quilt, mapped out the tumbling blocks appliqué, and told the computer to just stitch it all at once.  Then I watched in horror as the many many stitches went in to create beautifully round circles and spirals balls, but every time the machine encountered a seam line it stitched back and forth multiple times to travel to the next stitching line.  There were jump stitches all over the place that I had to go back and trim and way too many places where the design stitched securing stitches.  Not only is this a less tidy look than I hoped for on the back, but it took me a good hour after I’d finished stitching to clean it all up and trim all those jump stitches from both sides of the quilt.  Very discouraging!

Custom Quilting Progress on the 1984 Sampler Quilt

Good morning and Happy Thursday!  I've been making progress with the custom quilting on my friend's circa 1984 sampler quilt.  There are certain editing tools and features in Q-Matic (the computer robotics package that enables me to quilt digitally with my Bernina Q24 long arm machine) that don't get used in edge-to-edge quilting, and I'm learning more about how to use them to size and skew digital quilting designs to fit inside the imperfect shapes of patchwork pieced by humans.  My friend Marybeth is being extremely patient; I think I've had this quilt in my possession for six months at least, and most of that time I've been procrastinating and agonizing and catastrophizing about all of the ways I might mess it up...  But I'm feeling better about it now and I think it's going to look pretty good when it comes off the frame and I can see it as a whole instead of zooming in on every little imperfection.

Digital Block Design with Digital Sashing Design

I'm trying to balance out the different types of quilting throughout the quilt.  I think I have maybe three blocks like the one above where I've stitched one digital design across the entire block.  That can be quite lovely when it's a good pairing between the quilting design and the patchwork.  I did stitch in the ditch quilting in the patchwork seams prior to stitching the block design but some quilters would choose to just do the block design to save time (and to save money, if someone was paying for the custom quilting).

P2P Triangle Design with Separate Digital Motif in Block Center

In the block above, I quilted a P2P (Point to Point) digital design one at a time in each of the red print triangles.  Then I quilted a separate digital design in the center of the block.  I'll go back later and quilt the red and blue solid patches, probably straight line quilting with rulers.  I'm learning (belatedly!) that it's more efficient to do all of one type of quilting throughout the quilt before moving on to a different type of quilting.  When I started working on this quilt I knew enough to do all of my basting and SID (Stitch In the Ditch quilting along all the seam lines) throughout the entire quilt before rolling back up to the top of the quilt to start on the fun quilting that actually shows, but then I tried to quilt one row completely (digital designs, ruler work, free motion quilting, multiple thread color changes etc) before moving on to the next row.