What good is the Internet if you can't use it to jump on a trend? The first time I saw something relating to "very demure" was an Instagram Reel of a real estate agent in Des Moines, describing the city as "very demure". I thought that was an odd way to describe it, but I continued with my day. In a short amount of time, I saw "very demure, very mindful" pop up in so many other places that I had to google it. Apparently, it originated with TikTok influencer Jools Lebron as a way to describe her look and way of being. It has caught fire from there! Now "very demure, very mindful" is a phrase that is popping up everywhere, and just when I needed a name for my new design. It fits, doesn't it? 



Demure's design starts with the outer petals and ends with the medaillion-like framing around a center circle. The repeating shape is elongated. 



Every other row is staggered at 50% with this design. When arranged, the row-to-row nesting is minor and is not challenging to align when stitch...

With the Box Tie design, I'm bundling file formats as I've never done before. So, if you received this as part of your membership or as part of the Digital Panto Club or purchased from our shop, please read carefully to find out what is included.
 

Box Tie is a design consisting of alternately situated hourglass shapes. Horizontal and then vertical, back to horizontal and then vertical.

I don't know what I was thinking when I named it. Instead of Bow Tie, I picked Box Tie as I was in the design process and then... never changed it. I'm not proud of this 🫠 - I usually change the name to something more memorable.



But here's what I want YOU to remember about this design.

It acts as a "cheater" cross-hatching design.

Cross-hatching is notoriously difficult to execute as a longarm quilter, mostly because every row has to touch the row above and below it to make it look continuous. We try to make it look as though we marked every line on the quilt top ahead of time and used ru...

This is Oil Spill, a digital edge-to-edge design created for multi-directional movement!



I've always wanted to design a version of a serpentine meander. It was one of the first styles of free-motion quilting I fell in love with twenty years ago. With this design, I E-X-H-A-G-G-E-R-A-T-E-D all of the lines and curves to make it look distinct from "traditional meandering", but with the same idea at heart: varied shapes, random-looking, and not directional. 

I started playing around with this pantograph design in mid-2022 after my grandma asked me to quilt a vintage top containing "found" blocks. 

My grandma will be 91 next month. In the 1950s, when she and my grandpa were stationed at a military base in Arkansas, she was randomly given the Sunbonnet Sue blocks you see in the quilt below. Her mother (my great-grandma Estelle) added the interesting sashing made of recycled clothing.

So, yes. It's a Sunbonnet Sue quilt—and heaven help me—I've never liked the pattern. I know!...

This is Royal, the newest extended-width digital quilting design from your friends (me) at Longarm League! 
 



Royal, as an extended-width design, operates like this:
• The first trip across the quilt will quilt the "crown elements" (aka the spiky shapes) with the circles up.
• Then, it'll quilt a straight line right to left, then stitch two more lines left to right and then right to left.
• Next, it'll stitch the same spikey shapes (circles down this time) left to right.
• This is followed by three more straight lines, ending on the left edge and ready for another repeat unless you need to stop to advance the quilt. 

This edge-to-edge quilting design would look super cute on a princess's quilt (I'm assuming you know one)! But it could also work for a Crown Royal quilt. Have you come across one? They incorporate fabric from the pouches included with Crown Royal Whiskey bottles - it's a thing. Or perhaps you get a Kansas City Royals baseball quilt? Boom! This design would be per...

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 p...

I've always wanted to make my own version of "hand-guided" spirals to join the ranks of Feathered Spirals, Fancy Feathers, Echoed Swirls, Fossilized—designs I used to free-motion quilt before I had my computerized machine.

This was the first design that I drew on my iPad (using the Graphic app), then imported into Art and Stitch to "clean up". The most difficult part of that process was getting the rows to nest the way I wanted them to. After many, many iterations, I'm happy with the design that's meant to look "perfectly imperfect," like free-motion quilting. 

I think that the larger and more varied the single repeat is, the more a design looks organic. For these kinds of designs, my goal is that the design repeats and rows are difficult to find. :) 

I named it Perm because the spirals reminded of the curly hair look in the late 80s and early 90s! The one and only perm I got was a "spiral perm" at a local beauty school when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old. My mom took my ...

Fizz is so simple and versatile, it'll work on anything!



This is an extended-width pantograph design, which means one squiggly line will travel the whole width of the quilt and then will travel back right-to-left to complete the bubbles, baubles...? Melon shapes? What are we calling these? Chainlink, but cuter? ;)

The advantages of using this design:
1) No backtracking.
2) Stitches smoothly (no corners or pivots) and quickly.
3) Looks great in either direction — loading a quilt on its side can increase efficiency by not having to advance the quilt as much.

Potential disadvantages of using this design (hey, just being honest):
1) If your machine doesn't do well traveling right-to-left, you'll want to load the L to R version of the design which is included in the purchase. This means manually moving the machine head back to the left edge of the quilt for each line, like you would for straight-line quilting. Kind of a pain. But, even so - no backtracking is still an advantage.
2...

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 fo...

What started as a baseball diamond shape morphed into something that looked reminiscent of a graphic for America's National Parks. From there, I repeated the shapes at odd angles so that some secondary and tertiary diamonds emerged, but the "explore" feeling from an imagined poster never left.



What I like about this design is the graphic boldness of straight lines, angles, curves, and circles all playing together.

I found it funny that because I used such low volume AND extremely low contrast fabrics in this quilt, the quilting design pretty much swallowed up the whole quilt pattern! I was shocked by how little I could see the quilt pattern after quilting. Oops!

The Quilt

Believe it or not, this quilt is the Star Pop II quilt by Emily Dennis of Quilty Love. Here it is on my design wall before quilting as proof there were stars involved. Ha!

And then, after quilting:



To be sure, I knew that the patchwork would be subtle. It was intentional. This was a wedding quilt for a...

Ledger is a tricky design to execute and not for those who stress about perfection. How is this for a sales pitch?! But also? OMG, I'm in love with the modern-looking result! 

I like to be upfront about the degree of difficulty of a design because I'd hate for a beginner to get frustrated.



Ledger has a look you might only expect to see from careful walking-foot quilting on a domestic machine. But luckily—no basting, quilt wrangling, or taking it off the frame and re-mounting it halfway—is involved with this method.

I was feeling very ho-hum about this quilt top when I finished it at a retreat earlier this year, but after I quilted it, my excitement meter went up.

WAY UP! 📈  



I decided to experiment with grid quilting as an edge-to-edge design, building the grid "brick-by-brick". You can watch the video of the stitch-out at the top of the blog post to see what that looks like. 

I wanted to keep the longer lines of the rectangle free from backtracking, but doing it this way m...