Raise your hand if this sounds familiar.

The quilt top is done, it’s time to move on to the machine quilting, but instead of basting the quilt and getting started, it sits there for days, weeks, even months untouched.

You don’t know how to make a quilting plan and don’t know where you start. You have anxiety that you’ll choose the “wrong” designs and choose not to quilt it until you can figure it out. You know winging it is a recipe for hours of stitch ripping and just want a definite plan thats more than just a couple of vague ideas in your head.

What the professionals aren’t telling you is that they have a general process they go through to decide what goes where, even when each quilt (and client) is asking for different things.

With this same process in hand, you’ll finally have a way to narrow down the options and decide how to quilt that quilt no matter what it looks like.

Step 1: Decide on the Basics

The first thing you want to ask yourself is “What kind of quilting do I really want to do on this quilt?” The answer may be different if you are looking at a show quilt vs. something for a 10 year old grandchild.

If your answer is “I want the fastest option possible,” then an all over design like one of these stenciled pantograph style quilting designs for a home sewing machine is going to be your best bet and you can stop here and get to sewing! This is a great way to keep the quilting plan simple, get the quilting done fast, and branch out with some new quilting designs to keep things interesting while you quilt.

Instead, if the answer is “ALL the custom quilting!” then read on quilty friend!

You’ll need to start by asking yourself a few questions to understand the scope of what you are trying to accomplish. There’s a big difference in commitment between a semi-custom and a totally custom quilting plan. You’ll want to make sure that the left side and the right side of your brain are on the same page with what you want to accomplish. 

Stop to go through this list of questions before getting too far with your plan

How much time do I have to devote to quilting this? 

Avoid committing to something that will have you starting and stopping all over the place if you are on a tight deadline. 

What areas of the quilt do I want to draw focus to? Do I want to hide any places?

You’ll want to know where all these places are when we go to try some ideas out.

Do I want to incorporate a secondary design between blocks or pieces within blocks?

Considering all the possibilities will help keep the creative juices flowing and allow you to come up with multiple ideas to chose and work with.

Do I want a featured motif totally separate from the piecing?

Do you have a lot of negative space perfect to show off your amazing quilting skills? This is also a good way to eat up space in your quilt without using super dense filler designs and makes the quilting process go by quicker. 

How warm and flexible do I want this quilt to be?

Denser quilting smashes all the air out of the batting and leaves you with a thinner, less warm quilt. It will also make for a stiffer quilt. Consider whether you will be hanging the quilt on the wall as a show piece, or regularly using it on a bed.

It’s easier to iron out these details before considering design choices. It’s much easier to tailor your design around these choices as opposed to falling in love with a quilting plan that doesn’t make sense for how you intend to use the quilt.

Step 2: Take Inventory

It’s easier to pick out a chicken and dumpling recipe from a recipe book than to simply google “chicken recipes” without anything particular in mind. Deciding on what quilting designs to use is very similar. If you don’t remember you like stippling, you also won’t remember to use it the next time you need to machine quilt!

Grab a piece of paper and doodle as many designs as you feel comfortable quilting, or are interested in trying. Categorize them in three different buckets:

• Meanders/Fillers
• Directional/Border Designs
• Featured Motifs

Having all the options in front of you, categorized by use, will help you see the wide variety of options that you actually have. When you not only have to remember the designs, but also pair them together off the top of your head, you will always default to the same tried and true options. Having all of the options in front of you will give you a list to shop from later. This will make it much easier to visually pair designs you wouldn’t otherwise think of.

The key to having a good inventory of designs is having variety. Different scales, different densities, and different shapes. Include straight line designs with curly designs, large motifs and small fillers. The more varieties you can think of the more you’ll have to choose from later.

Step 3: Audition Ideas

It’s officially time to start putting these designs in the context of your current quilt. For this step, you’ll need to take a picture of your quilt. If you have designed it yourself using software, you can print out a copy of the design, if not, you can either lay the completed top on the floor and try to get a good top down picture of it, or see if you can grab a straight on picture from the place where you bought the pattern originally.

ProTip: If you bought the pattern, see if the pattern maker has any free coloring diagrams of the quilt pattern like this set Suzy Quilts put together. If you can use them to select fabrics, you can also use them to create a quilting plan! 

Print out 2 or 3 copies of the quilt top picture. Using something you can erase, and referring to the inventory you already made, start doodling ideas directly onto the printout.

Just like designing a quilt pattern, this process is rarely done perfectly the first time! Because we are just using paper instead of the real thing, It’s okay to erase ideas, try something new, or start over entirely. Changing your mind is the exact thing you want to avoid once the stitching actually starts so this is your opportunity to move things around and try different ideas until you decide on a plan you are excited to tackle.

Once you’ve settled on a plan you like, repeat the process one or two more times on a new printed photo. If you opted for many curly designs the first go around, try something with more straight lines this time. The third time maybe you try something more risky with a secondary design or a featured motif running through a section of it. Once you have 2 or three options you are happy with, pick your favorite, and get to quilting!

Step 4: Start with the Feature design

If you are looking at the picture of your quilt and you’ve already forgotten all of your quilting designs and don’t know where to start, then this is the step where we break through the creative block.

Don’t focus on the entire quilt as a whole. Trying to picture the entire thing that consists of 10+ hours of quilting can be super intimidating.

Instead, refer back to your basics worksheet. Where did you say you wanted to draw focus in your quilt? Zero in on those areas and simply work on auditioning ideas for those locations first.

Why are we looking here first? To draw attention to those areas, we actually want the LEAST amount of quilting there. The less quilting you include in a location the more it will puff up from the batting and catch your eye.

Its very common to think “This is my favorite aspect of the quilt, I want to put ALL the detail here, and since I don’t like this other area, I want to put as little effort there as possible so I can move on ”. Problem is you often end up getting the opposite affect. Drawing attention away from the favorite spot and emphasizing the other spots.

This is the trick the professionals use that is so hard to remember. Less is more when you want to draw focus. 

Step 5: Fill in the rest

Once your featured areas of your quilt are taken care of, all you have to do is fill in the areas around it with supporting motifs.

The key to a good quilting design is not actually good stitching, its having a good balance between your quilting densities. Quilting everything with a similar density (even with drastically different designs next to each other) will make everything blend in to each other.

Play around with the options of fillers from your inventory to see which look you like better. The only rule is that the density of your filler has to be smaller than the densest area of your main design.

The further away you get from your featured areas the less dense you can get away with quilting the filler, but up close you want to create that dramatic contrast that makes the featured areas stand out. This is another great reason to go larger than you expect on the featured areas. It means you won’t have to quilt the filler so densely that you end up spending months quilting it. 

Last note: if this is your first quilting plan, consider starting out by only using 2-3 different designs across your quilt. When you use different designs in every block it can often look chaotic and like you made a mistake. 

Using the same design in multiple areas of your quilt will help the design look intentional and pull the the entire design together. 

Once you become more confident selecting designs that compliment each other, feel free to branch out and get a little risky in your designs. 

Step 6: Decide and Finalize

Now that you’ve got a 2-3 different quilting plans to choose from, it’s time to pick a favorite! You’ll often know which one you are leaning towards before you get to this point.

Don’t love any of them? Keep auditioning ideas until you get it right, whatever that means to you. You’ve put a lot of time and effort into piecing the top, why settle on a less than perfect quilting plan to compliment it?

Once you’ve decided, it’s time to turn the plan into a road map with the least amount of starting and stopping. Breaking thread is the easiest way to delay completing your quilting. It’s just too easy to get up, stretch, go put in a load of laundry and forget about coming back.

Ask me how I know 😛

So create a road map to tell you exactly how you plan to get in and out of your quilting so you can minimize stopping and restarting somewhere else.

Once that piece is taken care of, the only thing left to decide is what color thread are you going to use to do the quilting? Do you want your bobbin and your top thread to match?

While matching them is a great way to hide tension issues, matching your bobbin to your backing fabric is also a common option.

If you have a simpler quilt top and you want the machine quilting to be the star of the show, consider choosing a contrasting thread color. If you have a busier quilt top and just want texture, go for a color that will just disappear against the quilt top or even switching threads depending on the section of the quilt you are quilting. 

And that’s all there is to it! You are officially ready to put thread to quilt and get started! 

If you want more tips and tricks when it comes to machine quilting, be sure to sign up below and updates as soon as new posts come out, and when you do, you’ll get a FREE machine quilting template just for signing up.