My Biggest Longarm Job Yet!

Late last year, I tackled my biggest longarming project to date — a queen/king-sized quilt! I’ve never made anything larger than a twin, but when my friend Carter asked if I would longarm this quilt top for him (so that he could gift it to his sister for Christmas) I quickly agreed.

Carter is living in Europe at the moment, so he shipped me the quilt top in early November and we corresponded via text. I had a few thread options and we both thought the silver (small spool 3rd from left in the photo above) would work well. It matched the gray background fabric, and blended well with all of the prints.

The other thing we had to discuss before starting was the ombre backing print. Carter’s original preference had been to orient the ombre horizontally, with the dark edges/selvages at the top and bottom of the quilt and the lighter portion running across the middle. However, I was a little concerned about getting that aligment right — I haven’t tried to precisely align a backing before, and it would have taken careful measuring and planning. That wasn’t something I was too inclined to try for the first time on a quilt meant to be a gift, and especially one on a Christmas deadline. So after talking about it, we agreed to align the print vertically instead.

From there I got to work! Carter chose Fishtail Palm, a free pantograph from Urban Elements. It’s not what I would have chosen at all, and yet once I got started, I agreed that it looked really beautiful on this quilt! The piecing is modern and angular, and the swoopy curves of the panto softens it up and provides nice contrast — and also looks great in the negative space of the design.

Since we knew there wouldn’t be enough time for me to ship the quilt back to Carter in Europe for him to bind it and then ship back to the US to his sister, I agreed to attach the binding as well. He wanted a thicker binding, which is another technique I had never tried! But this chunky binding tutorial from Latifah Saafir proved to be quite helpful. The most difficult part was wrangling the bulk of this large quilt to the side of my machine while I sewed!

I shipped the finished quilt to Carter’s parents, who gifted it to his sister. They took the photo above after she opened it, and I’m told the quilt was a hit! I’m glad I got the chance to tackle a big project like this for the first time, and happy it turned out so well. It miiiiight have given me the confidence to make a quilt for my own king-size bed at some point this year. We’ll see if that happens!