How to Machine Quilt Cut Ribbons, Design #478

This week I was cutting ribbons for a present and thought hmm…this could make a neat free motion quilting design. That’s all it takes these days to make me jump on the machine and quilt something new!

You’ve probably noticed by now that a lot of my designs are based on previous designs. How this works is subtle variations in shape, how the lines connect, touch or don’t touch, whether the lines are straight, curved, hook, or point all play a roll in how a design appears on your quilt.

So many designs can look completely different, but be quilted almost exactly the same way. In this case Cut Ribbons works like Flowing Glass, Wiggly Tentacles, and Basic Maze.

If you looked at all of these designs together like in the image on the left, they all have very different quilted effects, but they are all quilted the same way. Learn how in this new quilting video:

Quilting a design in a little square is one thing, but what about a real quilt? What about a really BIG quilt? Learn how to machine quilt the biggest quilts in the quilting workshop Quilting a King on Your Home Machine.

Now let’s learn a bit more about Cut Ribbons:

Difficulty Level – Beginner. Cut Ribbons is a really easy design. Like last week’s design Fire Flow, this is a great skill builder for echo quilting.

In this case I quilted my ribbons and left 1/4 inch of space between the wider ribbon lines and only 1/8 inch of space between the ribbons themselves. It can be harder to quilt lines spaced different distances consistently, but this design will give you lots of practice.

Design Family – Edge to Center. Remember how I said how several designs are quilted similarly? They are all members of the same Design Family which means they are quilted the same way, even if the lines are shaped differently.

In this case Cut Ribbons is quilted from the edge of your quilting space into the center. If you’re quilting the sashing between your quilt blocks, the edge of your quilting space is the ditches. So you stitch along the ditch, then quilt the Cut Ribbon shape into the middle of the sashing.

Where Do We Quilt It? Designs like Cut Ribbons work great in quilt sashing and borders because you can quickly quilt through the space using the ditches, or seamlines between the blocks as the edges of your quilting space.

What do you think of this Cut Ribbons design? Where would you like to quilt it in your quilts? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Don’t forget you can always find hundreds of quilting designs to quilt on your quilts in our Quilting Design Gallery.

Let’s go quilt!

Leah Day