How to Quilt Detailed Quilting on a Small Machine – The New York Beauty Version

I loved making this New York Beauty quilt, and I am so, so happy with how it turned out!  Because it had so many tiny pieces (and some didn’t have a good ¼” seam allowance- but shhhhh, don’t tell!) and because it was for a new baby, I wanted to make sure that it could hold up with repeated washings, so I wanted to make the quilting more detailed than I normally do.

Now, learning to free motion quilt has long been a goal of mine, but realistically, my skill level is still at straight lines, and generally along the seams between blocks.  But in this pattern, the blocks are 8 inches square, and some of the blocks are made up of upwards of 30 pieces, so only quilting every 8 inches was not going to cut it!

After I finished the blocks, I spent a lot of time looking at them, thinking about what would be my best method for quilting them well with my current skill set.  I even took them with me to Wisconsin to get my mom’s opinion on how best to proceed.

As often happens, her idea was the smart idea and is what I used.  It worked so well in fact, that I took dozens of photos and wrote it up as a tutorial for you as well!

This is NOT a New York Beauty tutorial, but I do have one of those, using this same quilt, and you can find that HERE.  Seriously, New York Beauty quilts look hard, but are definitely doable.  I’ve got the sewing curves part of the tutorial in the last post, and a link to the paper piecing tutorial HERE, and within the curves tutorial.

Precision Quilting

This tutorial is all about how to get precision quilting, with lots of detail, while the blocks are still small and more maneuverable before sewing the blocks into the quilt top.  The best part?  This tutorial can work for ANY quilt block in which you want to add lots of detailing, not only a New York Beauty block!

Here’s what you need:

          Quilt blocks- any size, and block pattern

          Batting, trimmed to blocks that are 1” bigger than your quilt blocks in length and width

          Spray Baste

Getting the Blocks Ready for Quilting

I split my blocks in those with the blue flowers in the center and those with the blue and yellow hexagons in the center.  My reason for this was to quilt one stack with one motif and one stack with another, and then alternate them as I laid out the quilt, just to get as much variety as possible.  This step is very much a Type A, slightly OCD step, and can be skipped if desired.

Put a little bit of spray baste (it doesn’t take much) on one batting square.  I used a light weight batting, I wanted something light weight so that I wouldn’t have bulky seams once I put it all together. 

Place a block on your batting and smooth away any wrinkles or puckers.

I basted and quilted three blocks at a time, so that I could do some chain sewing.  I didn’t want to baste all 30 blocks at once, and I didn’t want them to stick together while in a pile awaiting their turn to be quilted.

Detailed Quilting on a Small Machine

Quilt as desired, stitching in the ditch, outlining features of the block, using matchstick lines, free motion quilting, whatever type of quilting you desire.  Some blocks will lend themselves better to different types of quilting.

In this first example, I outlined the spiky points by starting at one edge, ¼” from the seam.

I used a long stitch length, and sewed down the length of that blue spike, turned the fabric and sewed down the other side of that blue spike until I came to the point where I wanted to turn and stitch ¼” from the edge of the next blue spike.

With the needle down, lift the presser foot, and the whole quilt block will swivel around, until you are pointed the direction you want to go next.

Then put the presser foot back down, and continue on your merry quilting way.  Here you can see the quilting outside of spike number one (it’s on the right) and I’m ready to quilt along spike number two.

Once I made my way around all of the spikes and to the other edge of the block, I went back and did the same type of outlining, this time on the inside edge of the blue spikes.  Because I was using cream thread for all of this, the quilting on the darker blue fabric shows much more than the quilting on the lighter yellow, although they are exactly the same.

All of the quilting shows through on the batting side of the block too!  Now, keep in mind, this detailing will NOT show on the back of the quilt, that’s the one downside to doing your quilting this way.  Right now your quilt sandwich (quilt top, batting, backing) is really just an open faced sandwich with no backing.  The backing will be added later.  It is a bit of a downside, but I wanted detailed quilting to hold all my fabrics in place, while still having a soft flannel back for baby snuggles, so it’s not too much of a downside.

These next two blocks were quilted in a similar way, along the edge of the spike, then swivel to the next direction, and continuing, the difference is that these next two blocks the quilting was done right along the seam (stitch in the ditch) rather than ¼” inch away.

Quilting Curves and Spikes

In this block the spikes have already been quilted, and I’m getting ready to quilt the curve between the spikes and the background.

In this block, the opposite is true, the curve has been quilted first and then the spikes.  It doesn’t really make a difference, do whichever feels more natural to you.  As long as your block lies flat (and that depends on precision during block construction) working from the inside out, or from the outside in, will both work because you are working with just an 8 inch block, rather than a whole quilt.

Matchstick Quilting with Curves

This was one of my favorite blocks to quilt!

First, I quilted right along the curved seam.  Then, I lined up the left edge of my presser foot with the quilting I had just done, and quilted a parallel curve.  I did another, and another, until I reached the outer corner of the block.  Then, I started again at the curved seam and continued to quilt parallel lines until I reached the inner corner.

I also did straight line matchstick quilting, although I didn’t take any photos of those blocks in progress.  Here is a finished photo of that type of block.

So now, all your blocks are done and you are ready to put them all together.

Putting the Blocks Together

Do not trim away the excess batting (yet!!!) but lay out your blocks in the desired way.

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Trim away the batting from all inside edges of blocks (the sides of the blocks that will be sewn to other blocks) but DO NOT trim the batting from outside edge(s) of the outside blocks.

This is a great time to get some “help” from the fat cat.  She normally likes to scatter blocks during this part of the quilting process, but fortunately on this particular evening she was all “I’m not touching them!  Look at me, I’m not touching so I cannot be in trouble!”

Sew your blocks together, one seam at a time, just like you would when you sew your blocks together before quilting to the batting.  You are definitely going to want to clean the insides of your sewing machine multiple times as you quilt your blocks and sew them together, there is going to be LOTS of batting fuzz in there.

When possible, press seams open.  I put my iron on a lower heat setting and tried to use just the tip.  As long as your batting is 100% cotton, there shouldn’t be any melting, but I didn’t want to chance it.

Once all of your blocks and rows are sewn together, you can use your normal basting method to secure the back to the top and batting.  For me, this means spray basting a few inches at a time, but might look different for you.  If you are thinking about spray basting for the first time, check out this tutorial, it’s got all the steps needed, and was a queen size quilt, so it will give you tips for quilts much bigger than this little baby quilt.

Now is the time to stitch in the ditch, along all of the block seams, to attach the back to the rest of the quilt.  For this quilt, that’s horizontal and vertical quilting every 8 inches.  Tack down the outside edges of the quilt to the batting and backing too.  And now you can trim away the excess batting from the perimeter of the quilt, as well as the excess backing.

And there it is!  A beautiful and detailed New York Beauty quilt that should {fingers crossed} be up to the task of frequent washing and drying due to being loved by a baby girl as she grows.