Introducing Straight Line Quilting!!
Yes, that’s right! Straight line quilting has finally made it’s way into the TCQ studio! Simple, clean, and modern, the offering of straight line quilting brings us closer to that beautiful contemporary feel we often look for in our quilting options.
“Hold up,” you say. “They are just straight lines. Why is this such a big deal?”
Totally legit question, let me tell you more than you every cared to know about the issue. Longarm quilting machines are notoriously bad at quilting in a straight line from the right to the left. There is something about the way the thread twists/doesn’t twist that causes thread breaks, skipped stitches, and all sorts of other time consuming problems. So if I wanted to quilt straight lines, the simplest of all patterns, I would have to stand at the machine and start each line on the left side of the machine, then walk it back and run the next line starting from the left. Soooooo sloooooooow. For a studio like mine where we are trying to run 4-6 quilts a day, that just wasn’t an option.
BUT! I had a fantastic tech from my longarm company, Gammill, come by and help me fine tune one of my machines and we are now able to let the machine happily move back and forth across the full span of the quilt in beautiful straight lines!
There are a couple of caveats:
90” is the longest I can run the lines. We were only able to fine tune my smaller machine which maxes out at just over 90”.
We will run lines 1” apart and wider at our usual rate of $.0225/sq in. Lines run more densely than 1” will be $.025/sq in, and .25” or smaller will be $.03/sq in.
Thank you to everyone who was patient, who pushed for me to get it worked out, and for those of you who let me experiment on their quilts. Together, we made this happen!
(Special thanks to Natalie Hollabaugh, maker of the gorgeous Summer Haze Quilt (Pattern by Suzy Quilts) pictured above. We used lines .75” apart.)
