Turnstiles Digital Quilting Design

Turnstiles is a simple design that delivers great texture! After I completed this top, I knew I wanted something cute and small scale to use for the quilting.

I struggled with what to call it, so I turned to social media for help and got many great ideas! Two years ago, the design we released was called May Flowers, so even though this is another May release that could very well look like a flower, I knew it needed to be something different.

Another popular name suggestion was Propeller. It makes so much sense, but since we have a design called Propel, I didn't want to confuse them. Whirligig was another popular option, but there are so many other Whirligig pantos out there! 

This is where I shout out Christi on Facebook for suggesting Turnstiles! Thanks, Christi—I liked it right away. It's one word (which I like), unique, and contains 'tiles' as part of the word, which calls back to some other name suggestions because the angled lines do look like tiles.

Perhaps the biggest factor in going with Turnstiles as the name is because I LOVE the song "For the Turnstiles" by Neil Young. It appeared on the compilation album Decade, whose cover is iconic to me. My dad loved Neil Young, and we played this record a lot in my childhood. In fact, in recent months I'd played For the Turnstiles several times. I'm always struck by how much I can recall the music that took root early on in my brain.



Turnstiles (the design) would be great to use as a small floral design and the "tiled" influence would reinforce the 45º angles as with the use of half-square triangles in patchwork.

The Quilt

Isn't this the cutest pattern?! The quilt pattern is called Hodgepodge by Modernly Morgan. I hope to make every star quilt known to man, eventually. So, there's that. But I also liked that the pattern allowed me to use a bunch of different fabrics in a "controlled" way within the larger triangles. 

Graphically, the pattern is bold and beautiful! When you factor in these fabrics, it's also very cheerful and light. Perfect for the spring and summer seasons.

As for the fabrics, somewhere along the way I bought this curated bundle of 25 fat quarters from Ann at Stitch Supply. They are so dreamy! I'm guessing most, if not all, are from Ruby Star Society. I may have added a few fabrics I already had at home while cutting the pieces out. 

I cut out all the pieces first in anticipation of sewing the top together at a retreat. I completed two other tops first, and this was the third that I started while away. I made a sample block, which was so cute displayed on the design wall. And then I shifted focus to sew of the stars, which admittedly was tedious but more fun when you're with friends.

Once I got home from the retreat, I put everything up on my design wall at home and finished the complete top two days later. Yes, I was still in retreat from real-life-mode 😇 but also, it was so motivating to see how cute it was coming together!

I didn't purchase any fabrics expressly for the back of the quilt, so I reached back deeeep in my quilting timeline to about 2005 for some of these fabrics!

I had a bit of this University of Iowa pink print from EARLY days! Josh and I watched nearly every game of the Hawkeye women's basketball season that concluded recently, so I thought it was perfect timing to use it up!

The Quilting Particulars

Turnstiles is an easy design to quilt. You can watch the stitch-out at the top of the blog post. The 45º line is stitched upward to the peak of the shape, and then small jog downward to where the four-petal motif is stitched, then the short connecting line is stitched again, traveling back up to the apex of the triangle, and then another 45º segment is stitched back downward until the pattern repeat is stitched again.

Here are the sizing specifications for how I set up this sample quilt size using my Intelliquilter (60" x 72" quilt size):

Row height: 1.74"
Gap: -1.197" 
Pattern height: 2.85" (measurement from top to bottom of the repeat)
Offset: 50%
Backtracking: minimal

The default sizing is a bit larger so that an adequate number of stitches could be applied to the shape by my software, but as I mentioned earlier, I was going for a dense "wallpaper-y" effect so I scaled the design down for this project.

I also wanted to call-out that I intentionally left a gap between the rows. I think it's more stressful to have the rows touch, so I designed this with a small space between.

Here's a look at the included PDF:

If you use Turnstiles on a quilt, we'd love for you to use the hashtag #turnstilespanto and tag @longarmleague on Instagram so we can see how you use it! 

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.