The trouble with bed size quilts is just how large they are.
It gets tricky to reach the center of the quilt with your sewing machine to machine quilt it.
And even if you can get to the center, the rest of the quilt around you is fighting the effort!
Whether its dragging off the edge of the table, or pushing back out from inside the sewing machine’s throat, or just plain getting in the way, patience is going to be a virtue for this project for sure.
Is it impossible? Not at all. But it will definitely seems like an uphill battle a large amount of the time.
As long as you manage your expectations and understand that this is an aspect of the project that you knew you’d run into, you’ll be fine.
Its going to be more of a test on your sanity and cleverness than it is on the sewing machine capabilities.
So to help keep your sanity in tact, lets go over my best tips for quilting large quilts on your home machine.
Tools to make quilting large quilts easier
There are unfortunately only a couple tools that can help you make this pr
- Quilt clips – These will clip around your rolled quilt to help manage the quilt bulk inside of the sewing machine throat. You will have to constantly be adjusting and readjusting them as you quilt, but if you are doing a linear design that runs the full length of the quilt, like straight lines or free motion pantographs, these will definitely come in handy.
- Dropped sewing machine deck – While not exactly a tool, if you have the ability to alter your sewing table to drop the sewing machine deck to be level with the table surface, this will make life much easier overall regardless of your quilt size.
- Marking Tools – Anything you can put on auto pilot will make this process easier. Marking out your machine quilting design ahead of time will allow you to be able to focus on managing the quilt bulk without compromising on your final product. Check out this full article for tips on marking quilts for more ideas.
Tips for quilting large quilts
Build a quilting plan you can sustainably finish
This is probably the most important tip on this whole list.
Don’t bite off more than you are willing to chew for this specific project.
Just because you CAN custom free motion quilt it, doesn’t mean you HAVE to every time.
Choosing a simpler quilting plan may be the difference between a finished quilt ready to gift on time, and a missed deadline and newly added project to the WIP pile.
This doesn’t mean you can’t free motion quilt at all, and it doesn’t mean you have to just do straight lines.
If this quilt isn’t going into a competition or planning to be something you hang on a wall somewhere, consider whether your plan is worth the amount of effort it’ll take you to execute.
Consider whether paring down the quilting plan, or altering it to a pantograph, might be the difference between getting this quilt across the finish line or not. Check out my full tutorial on how to stitch pantographs on your home machine for a fun change of pace.
Maybe the quilt is worth the effort of a custom quilt job, and maybe it turns out that it isn’t once you start thinking about it, it wholly depends on the project, the amount of time you have available, and the recipients. You’re the only one who can decide if it’s worth it. Just be realistic with yourself, sometimes ambition can get the best of us!
Start in the center
Okay so hear me out.
Being frustrated and burnt out is not the time when you should tackle the most tedious and difficult part of the quilt.
If you are just sitting down to start machine quilting this project for the first time, consider tackling the center first.
Get the worst out of the way first and then everything else gradually gets easier as you go.
This way you aren’t quilting for hours and days, just to get to the hardest part, get mad at it, and then walk away for a week.
Get the worst out of the way when you are in the best of mindsets, and then when you get frustrated later it’ll help to say, “at least the worst is behind me.”
Baste well and don’t be afraid to get aggressive with the quilt
You are about to go into battle with this quilt. The last thing you want to worry about is being gentle with it to avoid ruining the basting.
Although its the messiest of the basting options, opt for a spray baste and then iron both the top and the backing to reheat the adhesive and re-stick any air bubble spots.
In my person opinion, spray basting is the quickest, and most secure basting option, and when we’re in this large bed size quilt situation, you will likely find yourself scrunching it, pushing it, pulling it, rolling it, folding it, and probably many other things.
We want a baste job that’s going to last through all of that man/quilt-handling.
And having the flexibility to not have to tip toe around the quilt basting will take one more thing off your mind as you’re quilting it.
Readjust often
Bed size quilts are by nature, big.
Which means they are naturally going to end up sprawled all over the place as you are machine quilting them.
Since they naturally weigh more, they tend to flatten out across the table much easier and get caught on things (including itself) more often.
Readjust the quilt often as you go to give yourself the slack you need in order to keep it moving freely around the sewing machine needle.
This is a general tip that applies to really any machine quilting you might be doing, but is especially applicable when quilting larger quilts.
For more tips related to machine quilting, check out the full list here.
Roll the quilt
With bigger quilts, the closer you get to the center, the more quilt you’ll have to work in the throat of the sewing machine.
Finding ways to organize the quilt bulk so you can minimize the amount of fabric in the throat of the machine will go a long way to helping keep your sanity as you get towards the center of the quilt.
While I don’t think rolling is worth the effort vs. time it takes on smaller quilts, for the amount of fabric you’ll be dealing with on bed size quilt, the effort is worth the little extra breathing room in the throat.
Quilt clips may be a tool you find extra helpful if too much fabric in the throat of the machine is a problem you struggle with. Keeping the fabric organized can help if it feels overwhelming to quilt.
Support the quilt
The big quilts get weighed down by gravity fast and quick.
The more weight you have to push and pull against to quilt, the more physical effort you’ll inevitably put into the machine quilting and the more frustrating (and physically painful) the process is going to be.
Supporting the quilt using your table, or other chairs around the table will help give you the slack you need to make it manageable.
This will give you the room to work in your little nest right up near the sewing machine needle without struggling too much.
Related: FMQ, What Is It, How To Get Started, and How to Master It Fast
Posture
When you feel like you are constantly wrestling with the quilt, your body is likely to tire out and start to slump.
You’ll start to grip the quilt in ways that hurts your hands, and round your back trying to get as close to the needle as possible to see whats going on.
As little of a thing as it seems, bad posture can quickly make you sore making you stop a quilting session earlier and less likely to return the following day.
And this really doesn’t matter what age you are, 20 or 60. After too many hours, you WILL feel it.
Remember to correct your posture as much as possible so you don’t end up with a tweaked back or sore joints in your hands the following day.
Chair Height
For a long time I had this office chair I quilted in that had a broken pump to it.
The longer I sat in it, the more it sank.
I’d machine quilt for hours and not realize that I went from a comfortable height, to looking like a kid at the doctors office struggling to look over the counter at the receptionist.
When the chair had dropped as far as possible, I’d realized my arms had been raised so high to reach over the edge of the table that I was starting to get sore and couldn’t quite manipulate the quilt as easily.
I realized that the slow drop in the chair slowly forced me to adjust the way I was sewing without me even realizing it. I would go an hour or two sewing like that until I got sore from it.
When I’d realized the issue, I’d raise my chair back up high and it would feel like a whole new world quilting.
I could see everything, I could manipulate things easier, the whole process just got easier.
After a few times I eventually changed chairs to one that wasn’t broken.
Consider if your chair setting is a problem and see if you have other options to correct a chair height issue.
Mindset
When you are quilting large quilts, you have to go in knowing that this is going to be a tedious process.
Large quilts are inevitably going to be frustrating to work with on a domestic sewing machine, there’s a lot of fabric, and not a lot of space to work with.
If you are a quilter that prefers the quilt piecing process to the machine quilting process, you may finish a quilt top and have a feeling of “I’m done with this project” and then get frustrated when the basting, quilting, and binding parts don’t just take a day to finish, but weeks.
If you start out quilting large quilts with the mindset of “This will not be a quick process and I’m okay with that”, you’ll be able to manage your expectations and be okay with the fact that your quilt will not be completed the same day .
By remembering that your quilt is only half done when you finish this quilt top, you’ll be less frustrated with the time it takes to quilt the quilt. The machine quilting can often take the same amount of time as the piecing of the quilt top, if not more for larger quilts.
Play your favorite movies or music, take breaks often, and when you run into a particularly frustrating problem, be sure to look over this list again to see if any of these tips can help you!
Good luck!
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