Sound Waves Baby Quilt, QAL: Week 3 – Beginner Friendly Quilting

Here we are at Week 3 of our quilt along! If you haven’t got your pattern yet, you can order it here. You can view the quilt along schedule here. If you’re joining us late, you can still sign up as long as the quilt along is still going. Sign up here.

I love seeing your progress pictures. So, keep those coming! Keep posting those progress pictures on Instagram with the #soundwavesbabyquiltqal, #soundwavesbabyquilt, and tag me @snugglebugstitching.

This week we’re going to baste and quilt. Since this pattern is meant to be beginner friendly and easy enough to be the first quilt you make, I thought I’d make a tutorial for a very beginner friendly way to quilt this yourself. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with sending your quilt off to be longarmed. Long armers do great work!

Before you start quilting, you’ll need to baste your quilt. What is basting anyway? To allow you to move all three layers of your quilt (top, batting, and backing) in unison through your machine, they have to be stuck together somehow. Some people call this sandwiching your quilt. I think it’s safe to say that basting is the least favorite step for a lot of quilters. It’s definitely not my favorite part of making a quilt, but basting your quilt is super important. If you don’t do a good job basting you’ll get those annoying puckers, folds, and tucks. I do have a post on basting here. I went over pros and cons of pin basting, spray basting, and glue basting. In this post, I’ll cover my method for basting on the bed using stick glue. Then I’ll go over a super easy way to quilt without having to know how to free motion quilt.

Basting Using Glue Sticks

I have been waffling between glue basting and spray basting for a long time now. I am currently using stick glue because Mr. SnuggleBugStitching called me out for making a huge mess with spray basting. I know there are ways to prevent this, but I didn’t do any of those things. To be honest, I’m not going to do any of those things. So, I’m back to using stick glue, and I think I’ll be here for a long time.

When you use glue sticks, you need to be sure to get the washable school glue. I’ve basted a lot of quilts this way and still haven’t run into any issues with the glue not washing out. I like the purple glue sticks because they dry clear. If I’m dragging and the glue dries before I get that part basted, I can see this and know I need to reapply. The Elmer’s glue works great! I’ve also tried the target brand of the purple stick glue with nice results. I try to order the 40 gram Jumbo glue sticks because the little ones use up way too fast.

The white liquid glue also works great for basting and is probably cheaper than using stick glue and can be bought by the gallon. The stick does have a few advantages though. It’s not as messy. For me, the stick glue is a lot faster. Squeezing the glue bottle ends up hurting my hands after a while. The liquid glue takes a lot longer to dry. The last time I basted with liquid glue, I ended up needing to hang the quilt sandwich over my ironing board at night to give it time to dry before I quilted in the next day. The liquid glue also dries crunchy if you use too much of it. The stick glue dries in minutes and dries soft. You pretty much take it to your machine and quilt it right after you baste.

I like to baste the quilts on the bed. I’m not a fan of basting on the floor after having both of my ACLs torn and reconstructed. I also find that the foam mattress helps keep the batting pulled taught so that it doesn’t wrinkle up on me. It also helps me to baste the layers separately. So, I glue the top to the batting first, and then flip that over and glue the backing to the batting. Baste in sections so that your glue doesn’t dry up on you before you can get the layers stuck together. I haven’t found that it makes much difference whether you apply the glue to the batting or to the quilt top/backing.

You can watch my tutorial for this on my instagram here.

Beginner Friendly Quilting Method

It’s no secret that I prefer free motion quilting. It’s quicker for me, it’s not as rigid and unforgiving as straight lines, you don’t have to mark you lines unless you just want to. Also, the more quilting you use, the less your mistakes stand out. Free motion quilting is just my preference. That said, there’s nothing wrong with straight line quilting. It definitely makes a pretty quilt, and if you never learn free motion quilting, you can still make lots of beautiful quilts.

For all of it’s advantages, free motion quilting is intimidating. It takes longer to master, and some people/some machines struggle with tension control while free motion quilting. I also found it a lot harder to do free motion quilting on bigger quilts back when I had a smaller machine. I straight line quilted a King size quilt on a small machine that cost less than $100, but gave up and used the walking foot when I tried to free motion quilt a twin size quilt on that same little machine.

TIP – If you are struggling with tension while free motion quilting try leaving your feed dogs up. Yep, I said that. Don’t drop your feed dogs and see what happens. It’s been a while since I’ve dropped my feed dogs. I have quilted on machines that actually worked a lot better with them up. My current machine doesn’t seem to mind either way, so I just leave them up. If your machine comes with a needle plate specifically for free motion quilting, I would recommend changing out the needle plate and using the quilting plate for free motion quilting. This did make a difference for me.

If you’re worried about those feed dogs moving while you quilt, turn the stitch length down to “0” so that they aren’t pulling and are just bobbing up and down. You can also cover them with a darning plate or a tape a piece of cardstock over them so they aren’t touching your quilt. I personally haven’t found either of these things to be necesarry. BUT, if they help you, go for it! I’ve sold a lot of quilts, and believe it or not, no clients have ever asked me about the status of my feed dogs while I free motion quilt their quilts. It’s just another one of those things quilters tend to take sides on that the quilt recipients either don’t know or don’t care about – probably both.

If you want a little movement in your quiting but don’t know how to free motion quilt, try doing the organic wavy lines with your walking foot. Compared with free motion quilting, the walking foot gives you easier tension control, and you don’t have to rely on your own hand speed to the machine speed ratio remaining steady to get even stitches. Compared to regular straight line quilting, walking foot wavy lines add a little movement and don’t have to be perfectly straight or perfectly spaced. Just like free motion quilting, the more you put on there, the less noticeable any mistakes are.

I have a reel on instagram where I demo the organic wavy lines. Check it out to see how I’m doing them. You can make your wavy lines shorter and more pronunced or longer waves – however you want them to look. Let’s go over a few tips for making these wavy lines on your Sound Waves Baby Quilt.

Start in the middle and work your way out to the side. For the vertical lines, I used the seams as a guideline for keeping my wavy lines spaced out nicely. Once you have that first side quilted in vertical lines, flip it over and repeat on the other side.

I like to have both vertical and horizontal wavy lines. So after I finished the vertical lines, I flipped it around and did some horizontal lines. In the center of this quilt, I was able to use the foreground seams as a guideline. For the negative space, I’ll be honest, I just eyeballed it. This is one of the nice things about walking foot wavy lines. They don’t have to be perfectly spaced because the movement can hide a lot of uneveness. You’ll start in the center and work your way out, and then flip it and work your way out to the other side just like you did with the vertical lines.

The picture below shows what it looked like after my first pass of quilting. At this point, I was pretty happy with the density of the quilting. BUT, I franken-basted this one. Since I just overlapped the two pieces of batting and didn’t join them, I decided to do one more pass of quilting to thoroughly nail down that spot where the batting overlaps. You can read my post on this overlapping, unjoined franken-batting here. Once you’ve got this much quilting it’s a lot easier to judge where you need to quilt. Just eyeball it and make lines in the center of the lines you already have.

Once you have all of your quilting done, it’s time to trim the batting and square off the quilt so you can bind it next week. I like to use square rulers for this. You can also use the lines on the ruler to line up with your seam lines to help you with this.

Next week, we’ll bind the quilt. The binding I used for this one is pretty traditional binding, other than being scrappy. I used 2.5″ strips and joined them with diagonal seams. When we bind our quilts next week, I’ll go over my hybrid binding method. It would work great with this little quilt.

Each Week on the Blog

I’ll link to all of the other weeks near the end of each post. I will add each post here as I have them. You can also find this on the Quilt Alongs Page.

Week 1 – Gather fabrics and cut pieces
Week 2 – Assemble your quilt top
Week 3 – You are currently at the Week 3 post
Week 4 – Bind

Prize for this Week

Our prize for this week is going to be a FREE PDF pattern. The winner can choose any of my patterns accept for the one we are using for this quilt along.

To be eligible for prizes:

– You must be following me @snugglebugstitching on Instagram and post progress pictures for the week on Instagram by Sunday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You must tag me @snugglebugstitching in your posts and use the #soundwavesbabyquiltqal and #soundwavesbabyquilt.

-I will announce the winner on Instagram and tag the lucky quilt alonger so that they know they’ve won. The winner will have one week to contact me to claim the prize. Any unclaimed prizes will be forfeited.