Jumpstart your free motion quilting on this elephant baby quilt

Yesterday, I showed you how I used many of the decorative stitches on the Brother NQ900 to machine applique the center of our baby quilt. I really loved how each of the different stitches looked on the applique shapes!

Today, we’re going to add the borders to the center panel!

Piecing is a breeze!

The Brother NQ900 is great for piecing too! The ¼” quilting foot with guide is great for sewing accurate ¼” seams and the Thread Cutter Button is GREAT for when you’re chain piecing!!

Adding the borders

1. From the inner border fabric (gray), cut 3 strips 1½” x the width of the fabric (WOF). From these, cut two strips that are 1½” x 24″ and sew these to the sides of the inner panel. Press towards the borders. Cut two strips of the inner border fabric that are 1½” x 20″ and sew these to the top and bottom. Press.
2. From each of your six border fabrics, cut one strip 5″ x the WOF. Cut one section from each that is 5″ x 15″, and cut each of these in half to make two 2½” x 15″ strips. Randomly sew these together end to end with a mitered join to make the binding.
3. From the remainder of each strips, cut 5″ wide rectangles that range in length from 3″ to 6″. Randomly sew these rectangles together to make one long strip that is 5″ wide.
4. From this long strip, cut two inner borders that are 5″ x 26″ and sew these to the two sides of the quilt. Press. Cut two inner borders that are 5″ x 29″ and sew these to the top and bottom of the quilt. Press.
5. From the gray fabric cut four strips that are 3″ x WOF. From these cut two side borders that are 35″ long and sew these to the two sides of the quilt. Press. Cut two borders that are 34″ long and sew them to the top and bottom of the quilt.

Layer the quilt

The next step is to layer the quilt top with batting and backing. I used an adhesive spray to stick my layers together, but you could pin or hand baste if you prefer.

Prepping the machine for free motion quilting

When you want to free motion machine quilt, you need to drop the feed dogs on the machine so that they won’t be trying to move the fabric in one direction when you are moving it another direction. The feed dogs on the Brother NQ900 are dropped by sliding the Feed Dog Position Switch located at the back of the machine.

You also need to attach a machine quilting foot or darning foot. The quilting foot for the Brother NQ900 is great and makes free motion machine quilting super easy!

Now that the quilting foot is attached and the feed dogs are down, the machine is ready for quilting!

For the background of the applique design, I decided to do a large meander throughout. I’m so used to machine quilting on my Gammill that I’m a little rusty doing free motion on a home machine!! As you can see, my stitches are not all the same length, but as I tell my machine quilting students, developing skill in machine quilting is all about practice, practice, practice!! The large extension table on the machine made the quilting experience quite enjoyable!

I did a little loop-de-loop design in the first narrow border.

For the next two borders, I wanted to try out the walking foot on the machine. It was easily attached, and after I raised the feed dogs with the switch on the back of the machine, I was ready to try it out.

I decided to quilt straight lines across the diagonal of each of the blocks in the pieced border. The walking foot worked really well, but I did increase the length of the stitch so that it’d be closer to what I’d stitched with the free motion foot. The knee lift came in VERY handy for doing this border as I could raise the foot, swing the quilt around and not have to take my hands off of the quilt!

For the final border, I decided to just quilt parallel straight lines all along the border. The quilting guide on the Brother NQ900 walking foot was great for keeping my lines an equal distance apart!

The quilting is done!

Now that the baby quilt is quilted, all it needs is a label and binding!! I really loved using the Brother NQ900 sewing machine to piece and quilt this baby quilt, and since taking the machine to the quilt retreat a couple weeks ago, I’ve been piecing like crazy!! I’m REALLY going to hate having to give it back when I’m done using it this week!!