Shields Digital Pantograph Quilting Design

Shields is a digital pantograph design by Jess Zeigler (that's me!) for Longarm League.

I find myself frequently recommending pantos comprised of simple shapes, especially for quilt tops that have a lot of piecing, color, and/or fabrics. I find these simpler quilting designs to be the most versatile because they have a way of bringing calm and a cohesive element to a "busy" top. They lend beautiful texture without complicating the quilt.

This little motif reminded me of an abstract and somewhat asymmetrical shield. Or scales. Panning out and looking at the overall effect resembled a braid of some kind. 

As you can see from the video of the stitch-out at the top of this post, there is only a tiny bit of backtracking. When you set up the design in your computerized system, it does not need any offsetting.

When quilting this baby-sized sample approximately 45" x 50", I set the row height at 2.5" and used a gap of -0.512" for a total pattern height of 3.012". I think the design could support being scaled bigger or smaller, but this density seemed spot-on. 

I like that this design has some "wiggle room" between the rows. I think it would be a great pantograph for a quilter who is just learning their computerized system to use and realign.

Also, I could alternate stitching my rows left to right and coming back right to left as shown in the video without alignment becoming "off". Stitching out alternating rows helps efficiency because I don't have to stop, break threads and move my machine back to the left after every row.

I think this design would look good on a variety of quilt tops, but particularly a modern quilt or a kid's quilt would be well-suited for this kind of design.

If you use it, post a picture to Instagram and use the hashtag #shieldspanto and tag us @longarmleague. We'd love to see how you use it in your quilting!