Essex Edge-to-Edge Digital Pantograph

My inspiration for this design came from the "ribbon candy" motif that—for whatever reason—always seems so effective in adding great quilting texture.

Ribbon candy is often used in custom quilting to add oomph to certain areas of a quilt top, whether it be in the patchwork or in a thin border or sashing. 



I wanted to translate that ribbon candy idea into an edge-to-edge design that would be effective regardless of the quilt pattern. 

I couldn't help but see the shape of an S in the ribbon candy, and the name Ess-Dog (from the song Jenny and the Ess-Dog by Stephen Malkmus) kept coming to mind when I was trying to name the design. But luckily, during the Christmas holiday break, Josh and I watched the entire series of the BBC show called Gavin and Stacey, and a lot of the show is set in Essex. I thought this was a much more grown-up name than Ess-Dog. :) 

I wanted to keep the repeats somewhat "contained" and also wanted a nice continuous shape with no backtracking, so I put a tidy frame around each ribbon candy segment. When the rows are offset, the frames create a curvy secondary design that resembles an orange peel alternative or variation.

The Quilt

Have you heard of Happy Hour Stitches? Friends Lindsay and Elizabeth launched this pattern brand in 2023, bringing tons of sewing, quilting, and publishing experience to their joint venture.

They hosted a sew-along this past fall for their Bear Necessities pattern. Of all the quilt blocks I've made over the years, a traditional bear paw block was never one of them! The scrappiness of their example was enough to put it over the edge into the MUST MAKE category. 

I started with a stack of fat quarters curated by Stitch Supply Co. and added just a few other coordinating prints from my collection, including the green print at the VERY bottom of the stack in the photo above. That fat quarter was from Heather Bailey's schoolhouse at Market. For sentimental reasons, I was pretty excited that it fit in so nicely.  

My strategy was to alternate the large squares using blue and green fabrics, similar to how the pattern example uses light and dark grays. I added the yellow fabrics for the half-square triangles in addition to the greens and blues and made sure to have some color contrast between the square and HST units for each paw.

I came by the white and cream background fabrics "honestly", and dug DEEP in my scraps. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to cut from yardage soon; my low-volume scraps are almost tapped out entirely! 

Once the HST units were made, the lil paws came together so quickly! Seeing the color combos come to life was rewarding, and that enticed me to make more and more.



The closeup photo above of the backing fabric shows a lovely Mammoth Flannel by Robert Kaufman. The colorway is called Bone; I got this fabric from my friend Kristen at Mashe Modern. It comes in a 59" width, and since my quilt finished at 63" square, I had to get creative and piece a small strip of fabric to the flannel to make it wide enough.



I made one pattern adjustment and eliminated the small inner border because I don't like to sew borders. But, I do think it needed a frame and wanted to set the blocks off a bit, so I continued the scrappy background look out to the edge and used the outer border dimensions according to the pattern.

The Quilting Particulars

This is a straight-forward edge-to-edge design to use. Every other row needs to offset (stagger) at 50%, and really, that's all you need to know.

My sizing details are below. I could have gone a bit smaller in scale here, and it would still look nice. I intentionally did not set it up so that the rows would touch. You could do that if you wanted to make it look more like an orange peel variation, but it's easier to align and quilt with a gap between the rows like shown on this quilt.

I had no trouble setting my rows up to alternate stitching left-to-right and right-to-left so that I could complete several rows without stopping. I'm so thankful my machine likes to alternate directions because it speeds everything up.

There's a video of the stitch out at the top of the blog post.

Here are the sizing specifications for how I set up this sample quilt size using my Intelliquilter (63.5" x 63.5" quilt size):

Row height: 2.3"
Gap: -1.47" 
Pattern height: 3.77" (measurement from top to bottom of the repeat)
Offset: 50%
Backtracking: none

Here's a look at the included PDF:

If you use Essex on a quilt, we'd love for you to use the hashtag #essexpanto and tag @longarmleague on Instagram so we can see how you use it! You can also visit our full digital design shop to take a look at all our previous designs.

Interested in getting new digital pantograph designs like this one on the day they're released (and at a deep discount)? Sign up for our Digital Panto Club and get them delivered straight to your inbox on the first Wednesday of each new month.