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| Quilting Cables without Free Motion Quilting |
For many of us, a lovely quilt top is best accented with a simple, classic, cable border. It adds a beautiful and timeless flow to a design where straight lines cannot match. If you don't know free-motion quilting (FMQ) yet, it can seem downright daunting to direct all those looping, overlapping lines of quilting.
Luckily, this look doesn't require a longarm or complicated free motion work. Blooming in Chintz's fabulous tutorial, "Quilting Cables without Free Motion Quilting," reveals how to make beautiful, heirloom-sized cables with a home sewing machine and a tool you probably have in your home.
The secret weapon: Your walking foot.
Rahna's method uses only a walking foot—the feed dogs are not needed and won't need to be adjusted to keep stitches of the same length—at least not for the whole piece. A walking foot evenly feeds all layers of your quilt sandwich through the machine, which means there is no shifting or puckering that can plague custom borders.
Traditionally, walking feet have been associated with rigid grids or straight line channel quilting, but Rahna shows that walking feet can also work great for gentle sweeps. Turns out there is more to making a cable border than it appears and it's about preparing and working the machine carefully.
A collection of key insights gained from the Tutorial.
If you're feeling the urge to try this technique, Rahna has a few important tips:
- The Perfect Pin-Basting: It's all about precision! Close pin basting (also from Harriet Hargrave) is used to hold the layers together as Rahna's basis. One of the keys to tucks being permanently quilted in is to get your backing completely flat before you sew it.
- The Needle-DOWN Rule: When navigating closer to the cable loops, it is not an option to not keep the needle in the down position. You will have to lift your presser foot often to maneuver and micro adjust the fabric around curves, similar to machine appliqueing around a circle.
- The shifting, rolling and re-arranging of the bulk of the quilt sandwich is constant as you stitch one continuous line of cable around the whole quilt. Half the challenge is to keep the weight up so it isn't dragging on your needle.
- Start Small: Rahna recommends that for the first time you limit yourself to the outermost border. It offers you ample space to get a feel for the rhythm before moving onto trying to fit narrower cables inside of inner boundaries.
Final Thought
The great thing about Rahna Summerlin's approach is that it is democratizing custom quilting. It simplifies an apparently professional design into a series of easy-to-handle steps that are structured. A cable border can be quilted if you can follow a drawn line and are able to comfortably pivot your fabric. It's a great reminder that sometimes, you don't have to take up a whole new (and frustrating) skill to improve your craft, you just need to see your favorite presser feet in a new light.
Full Pattern: Quilting Cables without Free Motion Quilting Tutorial 🎁
