Three Quilting Designs to Practice Travel Stitching
Travel stitching is a super important quilting skill to build. It’s basically the ability to stitch a line, then quilt back along that line perfectly. Today I have three fun quilting designs that will be perfect for practicing travel stitching. Learn all three and practice along with me in this video:
Click Here to check out my new sit down longarm! This is the Q-Zone Hoop Frame with the Grace Qnique 15R and I’ve adjust the legs down so I can sit in a chair and quilt. You can also adjust the legs to be tall so you can stand and quilt. See the difference in a video here.
Practicing Travel Stitching
I was really good at travel stitching on my home machine. I think this is an easier skill to build when you push the quilt under the needle because you’re in complete control over the quilt. But it did take a few years, and a lot of quilting to master travel stitching on my home machine.
Unfortunately this is one skill that doesn’t carry from a home machine to a longarm frame. Because the movement is so different, you have to build the skill all over again when you make the switch. Again, this is going to to take a few years and a lot of quilting to master!
The three designs: Tree Roots, Paisley, and Escargot are all great choices for practicing travel stitching. Each of these designs involve a lot of traveling so I get lots of repetition with each design I stitch. And the smaller I stitch the shapes, the more practice I’ll get in a smaller amount of space.
Find a Travel Stitching Helper in Your Pantry
The hardest part about travel quilting on a longarm is how freely it moves over the frame. While this is awesome for making huge sweeping movements, it’s not helpful when you need to make slow, precise movements.
I decided to slow down the machine a bit by adding resistance from above. I placed a 3 pound bag of rice over the quilt so it pressed against my ruler plate on my longarm. This made the longarm harder to move, which helped me go slower and stitch more precisely.
Unfortunately I don’t think practicing on a practice sandwich is going to get me very far with travel quilting. It’s too easy to make a mistake, speed up and get sloppy, and not care about the results. I’m going to have to use these designs in a real, special quilt in order to master this technique on my longarm frame.
This might just be the perfect way to quilt my tree fabric painting!
Let’s go quilt,
Leah Day
More Frame Quilting Friday Videos
First Stitches on the Grace Qnique 21
How to Set Up the Q-Zone Frame
Quilting My First Quilt on the Q-Zone Frame
Very intersting travel stitching
Do you find it different controlling the machine when sitting down and when standing? From my (admittedly quite recent) experiences working with a small longarm and a small frame I find that sitting down makes smaller more precise motions easier, while standing makes the bigger more sweeping motions easier and smaller precise motions harder.
Yep, Susan, I have found the same thing with my longarms. I set this frame up lower so it would give me more control and hopefully result in more precise quilting. Still requires a lot of practice though!