Longarming Mini Series – Picking a Pantograph

by poweredbyquilting · July 12, 2022

As I'm catching up on longarming all of the quilt tops that I made while my machine was in storage, I realized there are quite a few things that I haven't talked about on the blog about longarming. Prepping your quilt for the longarmer is all detailed on the Longarm Quilting Services page, but for the pantograph, I have the customer select whichever one they would like. But are there other things you should consider?

For the North Stars quilt that I've been working on over the last year and a half, I realized I needed to be thoughtful in the pantograph design that I picked. Since the quilt was wonky and I knew that there were some itty bitty seam allowances, especially in the owl, I wanted to make sure to give my quilt a little bit of help to never bust those seams. I decided on a pantograph that had a LOT of stitching aka a fairly dense quilting design. This means I have more stitch lines across the quilt blocks to help secure the top down and help relieve some of the pressure on the quilt seams. I ended up with Circle Meander which is a reasonably dense panto by itself and I didn't need to shrink the design at all.

Sometimes I find if there is poofy-ness in a quilt, quilting super dense actually makes the quilt pucker in areas. Typically I see this on a quilt top and spray that area with a little starch to try to shrink the fabric so I don't pucker while quilting over it.

Other fabrics that have been known for busting seams are the fabrics that are loosely woven. A smaller stitch length while piecing and a denser quilting design will help the fabric not unravel with use. To me that would be tragic, spending hours upon hours on a quilt only to have a seam bust in the finished quilt.

Most of the time, for quilt tops that are well pieced I like picking pantos that either accent the quilt top design or contrast it to give some great texture to the quilt. I also have a few favorites that go with a large majority of the quilts I make that are super fast to stitch out so it helps me finish the quilts in record time!