“What is the best free motion design that’s easy for a new quilter?” I get this question almost on the daily! If you ask 10 quilters, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. It’s a matter of opinion and most quilters will share the design they are most comfortable stitching.

Today, I’m sharing my advice (and opinions) on what the best free motion designs are for beginners who want to try something new!

Why I’m Qualified – Handi Quilter National Educator

Hi! I’m National Handi Quilter Educator, Mary Beth Krapil.  I’ve been teaching longarm quilting for 16 years. I love to share longarm techniques and the best of Handi Quilter products. I hope you’ll follow our blog each week for lots of fun, information, instruction, and inspiration.

Loops! An Easy Quilting Design for Beginners

I think that loopy designs are the most forgiving and the easiest to quilt. Often times with other shapes we have to try really hard to make the shapes uniform in size and proportion in order to make the quilting look its best. With loops, even if they are different sizes and some are round and some are tall and skinny, they still look good.

Unlike a stipple, where you cannot cross lines, (the quilt police might come!), with loops you have to cross the lines! The motion to create loops is very smooth and easy-going. So let’s just dive right in and get loopy. 😉

Loopy Meander for New Quilters

The “Loopy Meander” is one of my favorite designs to recommend to new quilters.  It’s very forgiving!

Notice how the loops are pointing in all different directions and some are large and some are smaller and some are round and fat and some are more oval shaped? Easy! Oh, but there is one thing you do need to pay attention to when you quilt a loopy meander. To make your quilts look their best, (no matter what design you are quilting), you want an even distribution of texture.

Extra Tip: Even distribution of texture

What does “even distribution of texture” even mean?!!

It means you want the quilting lines in the design to be approximately, evenly spaced apart. In other words, you don’t want a bunch of loops really close together and then a big space and then some more loops.  Here’s an example of what you DON’T want:

The tightly spaced loops in the upper left will make the quilt flatten out. There will be poofy-ness in the big open space where there are no loops. And the loops at the bottom are spaced farther apart than the ones on top. This will cause the quilt to be lumpy. Lumpiness is never attractive. You don’t want lumpy gravy, you don’t want lumpy thighs and you don’t want lumpy quilts.

How to Quilt Loops for New Quilters

Achieve even distribution of texture by spacing your loops approximately the same distance apart and don’t leave any large gaps where there are no loops. How do you do that? Use The Secret.  The secret to smooth even quilting is to Look Ahead. Learn about The SECRET HERE.

When quilting, you want to look ahead and plan where you will go next.

Practice this every day (15 minutes!). Learn about the importance of daily practice HERE. Draw a shape (square, rectangle, triangle) on your fabric and fill it with loops. Draw another and fill it with loops. The more you do it, the better you will get at looking ahead, planning your next move and filling the shape without any gaps and getting an even distribution of texture.

Advanced practice: draw a shape and then draw another shape within the first one. Like a heart within a square. Quilt around the inside shape but not over it.

This example is a stipple, but you get the idea. Do it with loops. 🙂

More Loopy Quilting Designs for Beginners

Easy simple border design for new quilters

You can quilt loops all in a row for a very fast and easy border design.

It works great for smaller borders and for sashings. In the above image, you can see that I alternated the direction of the loops, mostly, but every now and then I threw in two loops in the same direction. I’m going to say I did this on purpose, to create interest.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it! 😉

Well, just maybe, I got distracted when I was quilting that loopy border and forgot to alternate direction. So I fixed my mistake by doing it again every so often to make it look like it was intentional. 😉

Pro-Tip: If you make a mistake, do it 3 more times and then it becomes a design choice.

 Get busy with practice

Getting comfortable with quilting loops is worth the effort because the shape is used in so many other more complex designs, like the ones below!

The Baseball design above can be found in the Pro-Stitcher included library in the ‘Mary Beth Krapil’ folder

Upgrade to Pro-Stitcher

When it comes to learning easy quilt designs, many people start out with free motion quilting, eventually adding or experimenting with different kinds of rulers and techniques.  There are so many different designs to quilt!!

Many quilters start with free-motion, and then over time they eventually set their sights on the Pro-Stitcher Lite or Pro-Stitcher Premium, our robotic system, to quilt!  You can still use your free motion skills, and then add in very fun and more complex designs.

You can learn more about Pro-Stitcher here!

What to read next:

If you are interested in learning more about free-motion quilting for beginners you’ll want to read the series of posts that start with:

• Things Beginners Need to Know -Part 1   
• Grid Designs – Free Motion Quilting for Beginners
• Echo Quilting Designs – Free Motion Quilting for Beginners