How to Quilt Pebbling! Quilting on a Home Machine and Longarm Frame

hello my quilting friends Lee a day here with a new machine quilting tutorial today I want to teach you how to quilt pebble lane this was one of those designs that I learned when I was just getting started quilting but I've really struggled with this design it could be a little tricky so today I want to teach you how to quilt it on a home machine and I'm also gonna try quilting it on my long arm I'm just getting started with long arm quilting so this is gonna be an adventure so let's jump on the machine and learn how pebble inquiry together so let's put some pebble Ain this design is all circles something has stitched a nice circular shape and slowed down and so I close it up and do a little bit of travel stitching there at the end I've got a little space here I want to fill up with a circle fits that area just right and you can have ovals you can have slightly less circular circular shapes in your quilt no one is gonna take a magnifying glass to your quote and investigate the size and shape of your circles so please don't feel like it has to be a perfect circle a lot of times I will fit a more oval shape into the quilt like this whenever I need to so pebble in really is pebbles and pebbles come in all shapes and sizes and ovals more oblong and then of course more nicely round circular shapes like that and your goal with pebble is to stack it together so you want the sides to touch I personally kind of get the itch ease when my circles don't touch edges so whenever I miss an edge let me just give you an example that's gonna make me itch but hey I want to show it to you I really don't like gaps like that first off I'd have to fill it in with some really tiny circles and those are gonna be more noticeable I'm like well and I wouldn't want to leave it open because of course that's a gap it's gonna be an open space so I try not to leave gaps like that I try as I am filling in a space to visualize a circle that will area all the way so that the circle the edges of the circle hit up against edges of previous circles so how do I do that how do i visualize that so easily and I know it seems really really quick and easy as I just swing around and form these shapes well basically I am mentally visualizing a the center of the circle now I'm gonna get out of this little area and then I can show you what I mean so sometimes you'll have like little gaps and weird stuff cut your circles and pieces you can do a little half circle shaped quarter circle shape whatever you need okay so we're working our way out and then I can show you how I visualize my circular shape actually this little spot it's pretty much perfect so I know that I want a circle that's gonna fit in there something like that but I'm not thinking of that shape I'm thinking of the center point kind of what is the middle of that space if I won a circle that's coming in like this then I'm thinking okay where's the center of that that's what I'm looking for I'm looking for the center and then my brain is simply echo quilting around that Center so that's how it works for me at least everybody's different though you might need a market on your quilt and that's perfectly fine please don't ever feel like marking your 12 is against the rules or somehow cheating it's not most of my really intense quilting designs and especially whenever I'm quilting a symmetrical motif I always mark those designs because I want them to be perfectly symmetrical so please understand marking is perfectly fine let me give you another demonstration of stitching around a midpoint so I can kind of see this area and I knew the circle is going to come in somewhere like that I put that center point right there and that's what I'm visualizing I'm barely marking that I'm just kind of indicating it with my pen there so that way I can swing around and form that shape and fill it in completely that way I don't end up with gaps on the edges against that circle anything like that I also don't like it when I overlap my lines because I think that kind of looks a little messy so when I'm attempting to do just straight lace simple pebbly I'm aiming for those edges to touch but not overlap but as you can see this can be a little tricky and of course it is time-consuming this is one of the slowest designs that you can stitch with free motion quilting so how do we make it faster and a little bit more forgiving well we can turn it into a different design this is called underwater rocks and it's basically kind of messy scribbling so instead of going around once we're gonna go around three times and we're gonna intentionally overlap those lines okay I'm going to do a small one and then I need to start expanding and go bigger there we go and then go with a nice big one right here so this is a totally different design this is not pebble Aang this is underwater rocks because as you can see it gives you a very different effect so I I call anything that has a different texture a different effect and a different stitching rule I always come up with another name for it because obviously that's a different design it's gonna give you something different on your quote so underwater rocks kind of looks like pebble underwater you know it is nicely echoed and you can see my stitches are getting kind of big here and that's because I'm swinging around so fast because even though I'm swinging around three times around each shape because I don't have to sit here and be so picky and you know really focused so far it on everything lining up just right well I can put my foot down and I'm probably gonna end up also moving hands a lot faster so when my hands move faster if my machine needs to move faster so I can speed up just a little bit and see what happens so I really love both of these two signs they're both equally beautiful to use on your quotes underwater rocks might be a trace a great choice if you're just getting started and just trying to get the hang of that circular shape there's one other thing you can do with pebble II that's really cool and that is to do a filled peddling and this is what I call it whenever you go inside and you basically just kind of travel stitch and build in thread right behind in between those circles so here I've got these if they're kind of like little triangle gaps in the texture they show the background but you can go in there and just run your machine at a medium speed and just stitch back and forth this is just the red painting almost and you're basically just scribbling in the background this is one of those times that really does feel like your coloring with a coloring pencil with your with your needle you know you're just coloring it in use filling it in completely and in this case I'm just turning all of that area white and you can see it really fills in and makes those circles stand out nicely so if I'm really wanting to stitch it up a notch and as you can see this is time-consuming even more time-consuming the regular beveling if I really want those pebbles to stand out and I want like a cobblestone effect really bold on that well then I'll make it a filled pebble egg and fill in all of those little spaces in the background it takes time but it's gorgeous but I got to say that would be something that I would only reserve for an art quilt something small something to hang on the wall because it is gonna make the quilt dense speaking of a real quote let's give this a try on a real baby quilt so pulled out a baby quilt here and I'm just gonna stitch in the ditch just a bit down the side so that way I have a side that I can work off of pebbly is one of those designs that you really build it off of the edges of your quilting space or you build it off the stitch in the ditch lines on your quilt and so I really want to have the shape stitched in the ditch of fit at least and please ignore these white lines that's just my machine basting I've done with water-soluble thread just ignore that if you'd like to learn how to baste your quotes with water-soluble thread definitely check out my workshop basting basics you can learn how to do that it's really fun and it takes out all of the pens out of your quotes so nice okay so I did a little quarter circle shape or hello half circle shape now I'm gonna travel stitch back and I am aiming to make my circles really big here and the goal is to be big because the bigger they are the softer the quilt will be and that's it overlap just a bit right there but I'm not gonna let that bug me I'm gonna keep on going I'm not gonna stitch over it either that'll just draw attention to it I want those shapes to be big because this is a baby quilt it's gonna be washed a lot I want it to be super soft and cushy and then I also know that the tighter and smaller you make those pebbles the more time it's gonna take and this can get really time-consuming if you're not careful a quilter that I really admire is Cindy Needham and she stitches pebble so dense that she doesn't call it babbling she calls it sand I think that's a little intense you know that's super super dense babbling but it's also really beautiful on you know wall hanging style quotes that's definitely a beautiful design for that purpose for something that's gonna be used everyday that you really want to cuddle up with on the couch you know you're really gonna want a bigger scale and bigger shapes on your quilt so keys to moving your quilt around I am wearing quilting gloves it helps me get a grip on the quilt helps me move it smoothly and easily I also have a tool on the back of my machine here it's a queen size supreme slider and that is covering my machine bed and that helps the quilt slide and glide over the surface and I do have minky fabric here on back of this quote which is super grippy it really likes to grip and stick to the machine and I don't think I'd be able to really move this as smoothly if I did not have the supreme slider the queen supreme slide are on the surface now I did a little bit of messy ditching there that's okay I'm gonna forgive myself you know it's one of those things sometimes you have to just stitch at the level that you're at and today I'm feeling a little tired and my ditching isn't going to be as perfect as usual that's okay so there we go two swung around for another circle I want to watch my edges here I don't want to stitch over the edge obviously and I'm gonna try and avoid doing more ditching since obviously I'm struggling with that today I'm going to try and kind of just run my circle up against that edge and just kind of avoid it there we go that'll work just fine now I'm going to fill in a circle all the way through this area so you can also do just avoid stitching in the ditch with free motion quilting then switch to your walking foot and I have another tutorial for stitching in the ditch with your walking foot and that does honestly make stitching in the ditch so much easier because the machine and the foot do the feeding for you now I don't really have a choice of really do need a use this ditch to escape that one I did pretty good I'm proud of that a lot of the reason why that one turned out better is because I slowed down and I brought my hands closer to the needle and that made it better I'm gonna have to do just a bit here I'm gonna squeak in there and sweep back out that looks good so you can see just how nice and big these circular shapes are forming on the surface of this quilt and that's gonna make about nice and soft and of course if forming circular shapes is a struggle go to that design underwater rocks you know swing around it make it intentionally matte see and then you're gonna get number one so many repetitions of the design you're gonna go around and around and around in a circle three more times then you would if you just tried to stitch pebble in and then you can also get away with it being messy it's intentionally messy and over laughing and I think it's really pretty too I think all of these pebble in designs are really pretty they really stand out nicely on your quotes if you're looking for a big impact if you have an area of your quilt that you're like I really want that to stand out and show off and you know really want that to have a big effect from a distance then pedaling is gonna be a great choice to quilt in that area because it's always gonna stand out a little bit and that's because of all of the travel stitching whenever you stitch back over another line of quilting you basically kind of make it bold you know if you're like typing a word and you make it bold that's essentially what stitching right on top of travel stitching stitching the ditch all that kind of stuff that's essentially what you're doing so anytime you've got multiple lines of quilting going on top of one another it's making it bold it's making it stand out just a bit better and it's so pretty it really is but I know all this travel stitching and hitting exact lines is gonna be a little bit of a struggle on my other machine it's a long arm on a frame so let's give that a try next so now I've moved into the house to my long arm this is the Greeks Kunik 14-plus it's been lately renamed to the 15r and that means it's stitch regulated so when I hit a button it's gonna automatically stitch out a certain number of stitches per inch and I really like 16 stitches per inch so I'm gonna get started you can see I've already been kind of practicing my pebble in just a bit and this is just nice smooth circles so I'm going to try and stitch just regular pebble in here at first and that is just nice circular shapes lining up together go make a backtrack and fill in that little weird area here with a nice oval shape and I have noticed that I've been gripping the handlebars just a little bit hard so I've been trying to loosen up my grip lately and go a little lighter and just move the machine with like my fingertips and I've been finding it's going it feels different certainly but I don't think having a death grip on the handlebars is a really helpful thing you know the machine's gonna move really easily it wants to move it wants to swing around so you know you don't have to really grip it really hard and as you can see this isn't perfect not by a long shot I have trouble stitching travel stitching cleanly and you know I can tend to be really picky when I'm quilting on a home sewing machine because I can travel stitch really smoothly and stuff on the long arm I'm going to be a lot less picky I'm just going for the shapes I'm going for that texture and here we can try that fill pebble Aang stitching back and forth kind of filling that area in but really on this scale I don't think that looks as good it's when you shrink the pebble and it's really a fill you know really dense fill in your home sewing machine that that kind of densely filled trebling really looks good but that's really it's it's all a personal it's all a personal judgment call really I think the easiest way to quote beveling on the long arm is to do instead of peddling to underwater rocks and here you can see I'm just gonna start swinging around and then I'll come over here and do a nice big pebble nice big rock and I'm just gonna swing around again you can see how much faster I'm stitching now but I'm getting more repetition I'm going around that whole shape three times it's so much more bang for my buck nice repetition of that shape of that movement it's helping me quilt it smoothly and you don't have to go around three times for everyone you can just go around twice that's fine too you know you don't have to count in closing although it's something that when I'm quilting something big sometimes I will catch myself counting because it just helps to kind of break up the monotony here off such a big one I hope you can see that this is just a little bit more forgiving and a little easier because I'm not trying to stitch it so perfectly and I think that's gonna be a better choice when you're first getting started and then it also it looks really good too I mean that really stands out on the quilt surface it really adds a heavy punch of thread texture you know if you want a place to look like it's covered in rocks or pebbles or you know just have that really pretty flat circular texture then this is really gonna be a great design for it and you'll get so much more repetition just by swinging around and around you can even take a different grip on the handlebars here I'm gonna bring my hands up and try gripping here you know kind of have to play around with it and just see what works for you I know some machines have micro handlebars they usually come up here on the front of the machine and that is not available on this particular machine but it's something to look into if you're feeling like you just want to really get your stitches you know your design even smaller on a smaller scale that might be something to look into too I think that the handlebars and just kind of open opening my hands up and holding it really lightly I think that's certainly hoping and the nice thing is even when I stitch wildly inside like here that's huge you know hugely off from my first line of stitching with underwater rocks it doesn't matter it still ends up looking good even when the white lines are really far apart and I would say that even quilting it this way you're still getting skill you're still learning that movement means feeling the machine move under your hand and you're getting the hang of that movement down and pebble is one of those designs that can be really tricky as you can see I'm building my thread and I struggle to quilt this for years because I was holding with thread that was just too thick and I just kept breaking every time I would stitch like that like right over another line of quilting my thread would break and you can only imagine just how many thread breaks I'd end up with you know over a big space I was just breaking thread constantly it was just too frustrating I could not put it in a quilt because I would knew I would just be tying off and burying thread tails all over the place so it's when I found isochoric that's the thread that I really loved for machine quilting and I use it on my home sewing machines I use it on my long arm so this is I support polyester embroidery thread and it works great and it doesn't break I can stitch over my stitching as you can see here multiple times and it just takes it and makes it beautiful and I hardly ever break thread because of it so I think that it's really down to the stride that you use if you're struggling with bubbling and you feel like you're cut and you're just really frustrated with breaking thread all the time then definitely look into changing your thread type there we go so I really think on a long arm at least this style underwater rocks instead of you know that really kind of more nitpicky pedaling I think that's gonna be a better choice so that's it for this video I hope you learned a lot quilting pebbly with me also underwater rocks and phil pebble ling - as you can see there's lots of different ways that you can quilt circles on your quilts and it really just depends on where you're at and your free motion quilting ability as to which one's going to feel the easiest under water rocks it's really great for swinging that machine around for stitching kind of sloppy and you know what it still looks great if you want something just a little bit more formal that's not going to have quite so much impact and thread texture on your quilt then regular pebble and trying to travel stitch real nice and clean so that way all the shapes stack up real tight against one another that's a good option and then if you really want it the most bang for your buck as far as texture and impact on your quilt then that filled peddling is definitely gonna give you that so I hope you'll try out all of these different versions of pebbly and have a great time free motion quilting them on whatever machine you have right now now if you'd like to learn more about the machine that I'm quilting on this is the gray skew Niq 14 + or they recently renamed it the 15 are and I have mine set up here on the continuum quilting frame and this is nice because you can set it up many different sizes I have mine set up as an 8 foot you can also set it up half size so at 4 feet it really just depends on your quilting space so definitely come and check that out you can learn more about this machine and the frame at Leah DICOM slash Grace and if you're interested and are thinking about maybe getting a long room for yourself make sure to call the company and mention Leah day said hello my quilting friends and they'll give you a nice discount on your order so definitely check that out and learn more if you enjoyed this video please like it share it with your friends and subscribe to our channel on YouTube so you don't miss the next video coming out soon until next time let's go quote

Channel: Leah Day Quilting

Views: 57,625

Keywords: quilting pebbling, free motion quilting pebbling, pebbling quilting, free motion quilting pebbles, quilting pebbles, machine quilting pebbles, longarm quilting pebbles, quilting pebbles video, long arm quilting pebbles, pebbles quilting design, pebbles quilting fabric, quilting pebbles tutorial, Leah Day, Leah Day Quilting, machine quilting home machine, longarm quilting machines, longarm quilting, free motion quilting, quilting for beginners, quilting home machine

Id: M_1_bxkHWU8

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018