Flight E2E Pantograph Digital Quilting Design

This is Flight.

It's a minimalistic version of a bird in flight. You can tell by the little beak leading the way. I wanted the tail feathers to look like they were nestled between the next row of birds so they got a bit of a scalloped edge.



Mainly, this is a fussless edge-to-edge pantograph design that will blend into the background but still provide interesting texture with its gentle curves and angles.

Remember the early 2010s and "put a bird on it"? Well, I'm a decade late, but I finally did it! 

If you had a quilt with bird fabric or bird elements like applique or piecing, this would be a perfect panto for it! But the nice thing about this design is that it will also serve as a nice texture without being bird-related at all. In fact, it might even be mistaken for acorns. I don't know, ask my husband. :)

The Quilt

This was a fun and fast quilt top to sew up, made with leftover scraps from other projects.

I'll include an image of the cutting instructions I made for myself when cutting it out:

If you want a printable PDF of the above instructions, click here and scroll down the page until you see a thumbnail of this quilt.

It'll be simple if you've sewn together a log cabin quilt before, but if not, you'll want to search for one of the likely hundreds of free log cabin patterns online to use in conjunction with these dimensions.

The Quilting Particulars

This design is a breeze to stitch out. There's no backtracking. Set up every other row to offset (stagger) at 50%, and you'll be good to go.

I set the row size to be small-ish so there'd be plenty of repeats, upping the crinkle factor when washed. I set my machine up to stitch left to right and then alternate rows to stitch back right to left. This made it go very quickly.

There's enough space between the rows so that aligning a new pass should go smoothly.

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 (45" x 45" quilt size):

Row height: 2.5"
Gap: -0.878" 
Pattern height: 3.378" (measurement from top to bottom of the repeat)
Offset: 50%
Backtracking: none

Here's a look at the included PDF:

If you use Flight on a quilt, we'd love for you to use the hashtag #flightpanto 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.