Long Arm Etiquette

I look like the Statue of Liberty. So you finish your quilt top and now you're wondering what to do with it. This is part five of Klea's quilting class and today we're gonna chat about the long arm. Once you finish a quilt top, you have a couple options. You don't have to quilt the long arm. You can self-quilt it on your machine. I recommend getting a quilting foot for that. It makes things a lot easier. Another thing you could do is like make clothes out of your quilt top, like a dress. Wait. Wait, can you actually imagine? I look like the Statue of Liberty. I look like the Fourth of July. I love your really cute dress. This is going to be a quilt, but I'm getting some ideas. So there's a couple things you need to know before you go to the long arm. First things first, you want to make sure everything is really squared up. You also want to make sure that you're trimming all of your threads on the front, but especially on the back, which there's a lot of threads on the back. And the reason that you're going to want to do that is because they can show through when it's getting quilted. And the long arm often times will charge you extra money if you don't trim up all the threads before you take it. I've made that mistake before in the past. Other thing is, when you're quilting, if you have some really bulky seams, the long arm isn't going to like that. They're not going to be too happy. So you want to make sure everything's pressed super flat. If you have a quilt pattern that has like a ton of different seams that are all coming together, my long arm lady gave me the tip that you should press your seams open when you're doing your quilt blocks. Other thing is, you're going to want to take your backing fabric, my favorite thing to do for a really large size quilt, I'm going to show you the backing that I got for this quilt. You aren't ready. Um, this is actually a duvet. I think this was 20 bucks on Amazon. So I'm actually going to be able to cut it apart and have two layers to it. So I can use this for two different quilts. This is a queen size. You want to make sure when you take your backing fabric that it's at least 4 inches wider than your quilt is on every side, just because as the long arm is quilting, the backing fabric can shrink. So you don't want it to shrink too much that you don't have enough to like cover the entire back of your quilt. And then when you take it to the long arm, some long arms provide the batting for you. So think of a quilt like a sandwich. You'll have your quilt top, your batting, and then your backing. So there's like three layers of the sandwich. Sometimes they provide the batting, sometimes they don't. So that's something you're going to want to ask before you take it. These are going to be so cute together. I'm going to trim this up and then we are off to the long arm.