Quilt Along #39: Quilt Busting with Matrix

It’s Quilt Along time and it’s also November and I know what that means! How many quilts are you suddenly feeling the pressure to have finished, bound, and ready to wrap up under the tree?

I ways feel the pressure too, but unfortunately never get started early enough in the season to make quilt-giving a possibility. But then I got to thinking…(always a dangerous thing)….

What if we focused an entire month just on Quilt Busting Tactics? These would be methods to knock out quilt tops quickly with beautiful quilting that also happens to be very SPEEDY quilting.

So that is what we’re going to work on for the 4 weeks of November – busting through large sections of a quilt with quick, pretty designs.

Now all of these designs can be quilted in multiple ways. Keep this in mind as you learn them. They don’t HAVE to be used to bust the stuffing out of a quilt, but they CAN be used this way and they’re all going to be very different and give a unique look and finish to your quilt tops.

The first we’re starting with is Matrix:

I’ve used Matrix on dozens of quilts and it’s one of the most variation-rich designs on the project because it inspired Matrix Rays, Blackhole Matrix, Matrix Maze, and Matrix Flow (something to try if you’re still craving variations of Flowing Lines).

This design is technically edge to edge and would work great in sashing and borders like all the Edge to Edge Designs we learned last month.

But what about using this design over a whole quilt?  How will that work? Quite beautifully actually!

Matrix was one of the first designs created for the original Free Motion Quilting Project. Find photos of all these designs in the easy to flip through book 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs available right here on Amazon.com.

Now let’s break down how this worked over Batik Beauty.  My goal in using this design was to knock out a corner section solidly with one design covering a large space:

So I started in the corner against a block that had been quilted, started a new line of quilting and wiggled my way to the opposite corner, off the edge of the quilt top and into the batting.

This is the one time I use the thread cutter on the Janome Horizon because if you quilt off into the batting, you can easily trim and bind that edge.

Make sure to stitch at least 1 inch beyond the edge of the quilt top into the batting area

 Sliding the quilt back into the machine, I started a new line of quilting back next to the first start, but this time around 1 inch away.

Once you finish the first set of lines, just quilt a set perpendicular to form the wiggly grid. You could also change it up a bit and leave some lines out to make it even more interesting:

Yes, this Matrix is on a 1 inch scale, you can easily space the lines very wide apart in order to finish your quilt that much faster.

How wide can you go? As wide as your batting will allow. Most Quilter’s Dream Poly will allow quilting up to 10 inches. If that’s the case for your quilt, just make sure to keep the lines of wiggly Matrix about 8 inches apart so it’s sure to stabilize the batting enough that it doesn’t shift within the quilt.

Here’s another quilt I’ve quilted this design over:

This older log cabin was very creatively (imperfectly) pieced and quilting different designs over the surface just seemed like a big waste of time and thread. Nothing much was going to show up over the light fabric colors.

So I just used a 5 inch matrix to cover the whole quilt! It’s stable, the piecing issues have never been a problem, and it’s one of the softest, cushiest quilts in the house.

That’s the real key with this design – let it go open and wide apart lines and you’ll finish your quilt very quickly. The scale I used for Batik Beauty was actually pretty tight in comparison, but I did this to stay consistent with the rest of the designs used within the quilt.

Let’s go quilt!

Leah Day