What is a Quilt Plan with HollyAnne Knight

Once your quilt is basted, it's easy to feel overwhelmed wondering how the heck you go from a quilt top to a finished quilt. It's very common for folks to be afraid that they're going to ruin their quilts. And today I'm going to show you how to not do that. My name is Holly Knight of String and Story and I am here visiting at Missouri Star Quilt Company to guide you to quilt with confidence. And what you need, Rockstar, is a quilting plan. Now, as you can see, I have here one quilt that is basted. It is ready to be stitched. And I have another that is already stitched. And the in between is what we call our quilting plan. That's where on either on paper or on an iPad, you can actually draw out what you're going to stitch and make all of those decisions separate from the process of quilting. Especially if you are new to finishing your own projects, just moving your quilt underneath the machine and getting that needle cadence right and remembering how you want to move the fabric around is probably enough to be getting on with. So, if we can already have some of those decisions made about what motifs are going in different sections of your quilt, that's going to help a lot. Now, let's take a moment. I'm actually show you how to draw this out. Now, if you are brand new to this, the first thing I recommend is to take either a printed copy of your quilt top or a digital one like I'm doing here and simply draw a meander all over it. Just get an idea of what it's going to feel like to fill in that space with a simple wiggly line. This is the most basic type of quilting plan. And this single motif is an allover design. This is a lot like if you were to have a panagramraph done or something like that, except that you're going to hand guide it on your machine. Now, let's take it up a notch and add a couple more motifs to this. What I've done here on this quilt top that I was showing you is more like a semicustom quilting plan. We have just a few motifs at play and these are all very basic, user friendly motifs that if you're brand new to this, you can totally quilt these. And I started in the middle. I knew that I wanted this center block to be the focus and I dropped a lovely swirl in there. And we can draw this out together just like this. From there, we've got this lovely piano key border. I decided to treat that a bit like a background and dropped a simple meander in. Now, you could decide if you wanted to do meander all the way through all the rest of these borders or if you wanted to make them as custom as you want. What's really great about drawing things out before you go to stitch it is that you can rehearse all of the options. You could draw 50 quilting plans but only stitch one. So, it lets you get all the ideas out of your head but also the jitters out of your system. Next up, we have put this lovely switchback in these this next set of borders. And a switchback is just a straight line with a curve at the end. And I love pairing it with things like meanders and swirls because it's still a freeotion quilting design. So, I don't need to change the technique that I'm using for quilting, but it is a little bit more geometric and adds a different texture to my work. I mentioned that these are the first motifs that I teach when I am teaching freeotion quilting. The other thing that I teach is a loopy meander. So, it's a wiggly line just like the meander we already did, but with loops in it. Or we can line those loops up like they're going out to recess and turn them into a handy dandy border motif. And that's what I have done here. Now, if I were quilting this and had not made this plan ahead of time, it would be really easy to get into the quilting process and feel kind of panicky every time I got to a new section of the quilt going, "Well, what am I going to do now?" By taking the time to draw this out, I can relieve a lot of that mental and emotional load before I start quilting. So, by the time I start stitching, I just get to enjoy the process. This is also really useful because you're probably not going to quilt your whole project in one shot. You're probably going to get up and cook dinner or you're going to go take the dog for a walk or the kids's going to wake up for a from a nap. And you need to be able to walk away from your work and come back. Making a quilting plan is going to set you free from a lot of the anxiety you may be feeling about finishing your quilts by giving you the opportunity to make your decisions on paper first and try out different ideas. By allowing you to try out new motifs for the very first time and to have that safety net so that if you need to step away and come back, all of those ideas are preserved so you can pick up exactly where you left off. Thank you so much for joining me today. Again, I'm Hollyanne Knight of String and Story visiting here at Missouri Star Quilt Company. And I hope you are excited to go draw your quilting plan and be one step closer to finishing your quilts.