Simple tricks for perfect echo quilting

Welcome back to my last post of the week! Yesterday, I shared my secret to a 6-point star without Y seams. In today’s post, I discuss my tricks to quilt these two lovely 6-point star pillows. You’ll be surprised at how quick and easy it is to do. All you need is to mark a few lines in advance with the Clover 517 – White Ink Marker – Fine Point, and you’ll have precision quilting.

Perfect echo quilting

materials

fabric

• 2 – 20” squares of Fabric Creations 100% Cotton Fabric
• 4 – 18½” x 13” pieces of fabric for the back of your pillows (I used Kaffe Fassett fabric)
• 2 – 20” squares of Fairfield Toasty Cotton Natural Cotton Quilt Batting

thread

• Gütermann Cotton 30wt Thread – Autumn Leaves

 notions

• Odif 505 Temporary Quilt Basting Adhesive Fabric Spray
• Klassé Quilting Needles Carded – Size 80/12
• Clover 517 – White Ink Marker – Fine Point
• Omnigrid 1” x 12” Ruler

The first step is to sandwich your 6-point star project.

Using Odif 505 adhesive spray, sandwich the stars onto the batting and backing. Now for the quilting, I used my stitch in the ditch quilting foot and a variegated thread for the diamond patches. I started by quilting in the ditch the three seam lines that go from edge to edge of the pattern. These are the seams that hold the 6-point stars together.

Before continuing to quilt, I marked the diamond shape for accurate quilting using the Omnigrid 1” x 12” Ruler and Clover 517 – White Ink Marker – Fine Point.

1. Mark the inside edge of your diamond shape at ⅜”.

Note: ⅜” is the space between the needle of my sewing machine and the edge of the stitch in the ditch quilting foot.

2. Mark the diagonal line from the center to the outer edge point of the diamond.

Here’s a video demonstrating the marking of my diamond unit.

Echo quilting made easy

The following video explains how I quilted the echo diamond design onto my diamond units on my pillow.

Now, if you watched to the end of the video, you likely noticed the end of the quilting does not have a perfect diamond. I was concentrating so much on making the video that I missed that part. So, I did like every quilter does at this point. I pulled out my seam ripper and corrected the quilting. Here is the video I made showing the proper way to end the quilting with a perfect diamond shape.

Now to quilt the background fabric of the 6-point star, I decided to simply quilt an echo design around the star. To ensure the quilting is perfect, you need to mark your fabric once more. Grab your ruler and align it from the center of the star to the outer edge of a diamond unit, and mark the line from that point to the edge of the pillow. Repeat for all 6 diamond sections. Here’s a video to explain how.

Now here are two videos demonstrating how I quilted the echo design on the background fabric.

The first video explains how to quilt the first 2 echo lines.

The second video explains how to quilt echo lines to finish the quilting.

Now that the quilting is completed, trim off the excess and finish it into a pillow. To make the back of the pillow, check out Christine Baker’s post on Sewing up the back porch pillow.

Both back and front of the pillows look great!

See how a simple marking makes a perfect echo quilt design

I hope you enjoyed following my blog posts this week and that you’ll make these beautiful pillows. Stop being afraid of making stars and see how easy and fun these are to make with the right tools such as the Clover 517 – White Ink Marker – Fine Point and the Omnigrid 1” x 12” Ruler! Please do share your finished project with me by tagging your images with #TheSewGoesOn.

This is part 5 of 5 in this series

Go back to part 4: The secret to perfect alignment on a 6-point star is REVEALED!

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