quilting tips

Creating Texture

Every time you quilt you are creating texture. The very nature of what makes up a quilt, three layers, with the center being a compressible fiber, means that when you stitch the three layers together you will compress that inner layer with your stitches and create texture. The location of the stitches will be lower […]

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National Quilting Month

March is National Quilting Month. It’s our favorite month of the year here at Handi Quilter. What are you going to do to celebrate? Here are TEN great ideas to help get you started. Finish a UFO If you have been a quilter for a while (a year? a month? a day!) you probably have […]

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Power Protection

Are you taking care of power protection for your beloved longarm machine? Do you even know what that means? We all want to take the best care of our machines so that we can have fun finishing quilts for years to come. Power protection puts a layer of protection between your treasured electronics and the […]

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Doodling tips

We have been following Diane’s adventures in learning to quilt and a few weeks back I gave some doodling tips to help her (and you). You can read that post here. More Doodling Tips I have a few more tips that will shorten your learning curve. Things you can do to make your doodling help […]

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Quilting Sideways?

For those who quilt on a frame system with a moveable machine, sometimes it just makes more sense to do the quilting sideways. Normally we load a quilt onto our frame with the top edge at the top and the bottom edge at the bottom. But there are times it can be advantageous to load […]

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When to Frog Machine Quilting – and When to Resist

My friend, HQ Stitch Ambassador, Diane Harris is quilting her scrappy Gypsy Wife on her HQ Capri stationary longarm machine. She’s fairly new to machine quilting. And she is chronicling her adventures with her new machine over on the HQ Stitch blog. This week she asks the question, “when to frog machine quilting – and […]

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Building New Habits

My friend and colleague Diane Harris, HQ Stitch Brand Ambassador, shared some new habits she is building in her recent blog post over on the HQ Stitch page. Be sure to check it out; there are some great habits to get more piecing done. A couple of her habits will really help with finishing more […]

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A Time-Saving Tip

We all want to use our quilting time efficiently. Sometimes a time-saving tip is just the thing that will give you a few extra minutes in your day. I needed to quilt 3 baby quilts that were approximately the same size. Rather than load the backing fabric for each quilt, I sewed the 3 backings […]

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Deep Clean

I was playing with my new Handi Felting Foot recently and decided I needed to do a deep clean before I go back to regular quilting. Haven’t heard of the Felting Foot? You can see it here. A deep clean is something you should do every so often. Not like the normal maintenance of clearing […]

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Thoughts on Batting

The top is finished and the backing has been pulled together. Now we’re ready for the best part, the quilting. But we have to have something in the middle to make it into a quilt. I have some thoughts on batting that I’d like to share. It’s the least appreciated part of the quilt. But […]

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