Preparing Your Quilt to be Quilted

1-Make sure all seams are sewn securely. If a seam is open the longarm foot can get caught under it causing the quilt top to rip.

2-Trim loose threads on the back of the quilt.

3-Remove any pins in the quilt top.

4-Quilt tops should be squared up, with widths the same top and bottom and lengths the same on both sides. Quilts will be quilted in the condition “as received.” Trimming, if requested, is limited to the excess fabric and batting beyond the quilted top after it is quilted. We will return any leftover useable fabric and batting.

5-Make the batting and backing to be 5” or more larger than the quilt top ALL THE WAY AROUND. So cut the batting and backing at least 10” wider than the horizonal width and 10” longer than the vertical length of the quilt top. When we don’t have this extra fabric the longarm can bang up or get caught against the side clamps and can wreak havoc. EXCEPTION: 108” wide backing is OK for a king size quilt (usually measures 106 ish) as we will baste on extensions. There are some 120” wide quilt backing fabrics but we understand the selection is very limited (usually only white, cream or black) whereas there are hundreds of 108” selections.

6-You may provide your own batting or purchase some from us. Poor quality batting (i.e. the cheapest stuff in the big fabric chains or found in closeout stores) varies in thickness. Hold it up to the light and you will see what I mean. If you want a different color thread on the back than the front, you want to use good batting so that the colors connect inside the batting, If not, you may see some of the other thread color on either side where the batting is thin.

7-We do not charge a thread charge. Mainly this is because we only will use our own high quality threads. We mainly use Glide Thread which has a bit of shine to it. It’s strong and does not break at the high speeds that our longarm stitches, up to 2500 stitches per minute!

Don’t have any batting?

We carry Quilters Dream batting in 100% cotton, an 80/20 cotton/polyester blend and 100% polyester. We can special order you any type of batting that Quilter’s Dream offers-black batting, wool batting, bamboo batting you name it and we do have samples here. We offer 35% off the retail price if you are using it in a quilt we are quilting.

See the choices here:

Quilters Dream Batting https://www.quiltersdreambatting.com/