How can I machine quilt a big quilt on my sewing machine? If you know the right tricks, you may decide to tackle the machine quilting of even a very large quilt on your home sewing machine. Wendy Hill offers some advice on the subject.

What are some options for machine quilting a big quilt with a home sewing machine?

- A Quilter's Review reader

Wendy Hill responds:

When a quilt is just too big to handle but you want to do your own machine quilting, assemble the quilt in sections (such as four quadrants). Machine quilt each section with batting and backing fabric.

Assemble the sections right sides together. Iron the seams open. Cover up the seams with a blindstitched tube or bias strip of the backing fabric. Bind the edges as usual.

You can take advantage of this approach to put fun fabrics on the back, and get two quilts in one! I just used this method to machine quilt a bed quilt that finished at 110" square.

This same idea is appropriate for other situations as well. When doing a lot of close machine quilting, the quilt top can get distorted. To keep close machine quilting from ruining a quilt, quilt the top to the batting only or to batting and a very lightweight fabric, square it up, then attach the real backing fabric with a few quilting lines (in the ditch between blocks or around a few design elements).

Another example might be when you are just learning to free-motion quilt. Your stitching might look pretty good from the top, but the tension could have problems on the back. Quilt the top to the batting or batting and lightweight fabric then add the real backing fabric as described above.

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