Quilting with your embroidery machine

If you are a quilter, you may find yourself getting excited about owning an embroidery machine. Why? Because apart from just being able to quilt, it can help you add beautiful personalized embroidery designs to your creations.

Embroidery has existed for hundreds of years and has always been considered one of the most important and beautiful ways of personalizing clothes, accessories, or quilts. A quilter often decides to add a little extra touch to his or her pattern by using embroidered flowers or other small designs. But with the advent of embroidery machines, both embroidery and quilting has become quite different: much more expansive, convenient and accessible.

How to use an embroidery machine for quilting

A good embroidery machine can easily become a quilting machine once you decide that you are willing to give it a try.

If you are a beginner, you can try starting with a simple one-color design, such as a heart, a flower, a house, or a sun. These embroidery designs can work very well as quilting stitches!

When choosing the embroidery patches you would like to use, keep in mind the theme of your quilt. You can do a double wedding ring quilt, for instance. The top of this beautiful quilt is intricate and showcases a great variety of colors, while the back outlines the pattern on the top with a simple stitch. To make your quilt unique and special, you can try quilting hearts into the design using your embroidery machine!

You can also use the machine to make a quick quilt. The notion may seem impossible, but sometimes you just need an emergency birthday or wedding gift, and you would love to personalize it by creating it yourself. An embroidery machine can help you achieve this goal and create a quilt very quickly.

Fun with your embroidery machine and quilting

Using your embroidery machine for quilting is fun!

What you have to do is hoop the top fabric of the quilt into an embroidery hoop, choose some embroidery designs and start working! This strategy can work for a variety of colors and fabrics, and it is a fast, efficient and time-saving way to make a meaningful and personalized gift.

You can also try making a baby blanket, with patterns like trucks, trains or airplanes (or flowers and dolls for a girl) in your quilting pattern. All you have to do is re-hoop the fabric, push the start button, and watch beautiful embroidery stitches appear on your quilt! It’s as simple as that. Most embroidery machines come fully programmed with an expansive embroidery library included into their computer system. If you cannot find a pattern you are looking for, you can always ask a professional digitizer to help you turn a picture or even a photograph into an embroidery pattern. The most important thing to remember in that case is to tell the digitizer that you will be using the pattern for quilting, so that they can plan out the stitches accordingly. Otherwise, you can also go online and choose from hundreds of embroidery designs that are posted for a small fee or even free of cost. Then, you can upload the design and transfer it to your embroidery machine using a flash drive – most machines offer a USB slot used precisely for that purpose.

You do not have to confine yourself to small projects if you choose to use machine embroidery in your quilting work. When doing a larger project you may want to use the embroidery machine to do individual quilt blocks. You can experiment to your heart’s content until you really decide which practice is best for your desired result. With a computerized embroidery machine there are no limits to your creativity!