Radiant Stitches on the performance icon add joy to a baby quilt

Now the stitching adventure begins! In yesterday’s post I assembled the modern baby quilt top. The PFAFF performance icon is making quick work of this project and giving me so many opportunities to take creative license with this quilt.

To get ready for the radiant stitches I have to plan ahead. I marked the curved lines for the stitches before I layered and pinned the quilt together with the backing and the batting. I used a glass pie plate and the UNIQUE Quilter’s Fast Fade marker to mark my lines.

With the label stitched into the backing, I’m now ready to lay out the backing, batting, and quilt top to pin baste them together. I also cleaned the floor first!

To start quilting the quilt, I sewed in the ditch of the vertical block seams with blue thread. Then I went in the ditch of the half-square triangles and sewed beside both sides of the floating stitches. I did all of the blue, then switched to green to do the green areas and finally the white. Once this grid of quilting was in place, it was time to start the radiant stitches.

Radiant stitches are in section 8, Technique stitches, just like the floating stitches. Select subsection 6 to view them all in the Stitch menu. The Stitch menu gives you details about stitches before you select them including in this case, instructions on how to stitch out radiant stitches. This is how I knew I needed the UNIQUE Quilter’s Fast Fade marker!

Once you’re done reading, touch LOAD to bring your selected radiant stitch into sewing mode.

The radiant stitches stitch out behind the presser foot – making sure I turned the fabric the right direction was the only hard part of this process. And really, it just meant I had to pay attention 🙂

To use this technique, line up the needle with the marked line and press the Start/Stop button. When the machine stops, turn the fabric and then press the button again. When the machine completes the stitch it stops again. Turn the fabric again and line it up with the marked line. This process repeats until the line is complete. I used the Cut function button at the end of a line so the machine could secure the threads and snip them for me.

Stitching with a contrasting thread helped me create the forest and wilderness I was planning since I began this stitching adventure.

I used as many radiant stitches as I dared! I limited myself to three radiant stitches in each quadrant 🙂 I played with using thread that contrasted or blended into the fabric color. I like to think I created sunshine, rain, pine trees, birch trees, flowers, snow (it happens in the mountains!), and goldenrod (weeds happen too!). See, I told you this was my favorite stitch technique yet!

I was really anxious to try out the radiant stitches on the PFAFF performance icon. I had to basically make a quilt before I could test out my ideas and I was so glad to see them stitch out!