soccertxi

One of my favorite places to get ideas are on longarmers blogs. My favorite is Jessica Jones. She is the daughter of DeLoa Jones, a machine quilting teacher. Jessica is local to me in the Phx area. I can spend hours on her gallery and have even tried some of her pantographs as freehand on my quilts. Here is her website.

http://www.jessicasquiltingstudio.com/ (click on gallery to get to the quilts)

I also look on the sites with stencils or pantographs. Dover books has many books with copywrite free motifs I use alot for inspiration. I keep a notebook and when I see something I think I could use as a quilting design, I cut it out and paste in there. Have pictures of rugs, jewelery, and all sorts of things with patterns. Its kind of an obsession as you can tell!

biscuitqueen

I use templates or make them myself that way I can get a good feel for what I want it to look like. I like to try different things all the time. I googled simple color pages for toddlers and came up with some really cute pictures that I used on one of my charity quilts.

Rhonda Lee

I have quilted for many years, and yet I find such an education here. I sometimes feel like a beginner. Thanks all you lovely people. Inspiration - just what I have been looking for.

JulieTN

I use only one idea - if the pattern used to make the quilt top hasmany straight lines, I use cruved quilting designs. If the quilt top looks curvey, I use straight lines - most often.

Because it is so boring to do, I never ever do the 1/4" from the seam stitching - nor stitch in the ditch type.

In Early American times, 2 lines of quilting no more than 1/2 apart on the diagonal were used. You do space the double lines by about 1" to 1.5" from each other. Looks much better than you might think, and is fast to quilt.

Julie

mpspeedy

I use painter's tape or masking tape to quilt a crosshatch. It is so easy just quilt along both edges and then pull off the tape and move it over. The tape comes in all kinds of widths so you can make your squares or diamonds any size.

pjnesler

Lots of books and new magazines, but the latest I've started is a computer "FOLDER" titled "quilt inspirations" full of .jpg images of quilts, line art, photos etc that I think would look nice as a quilt. I designate that folder to be used as my screen saver, so I always have reminders of what I would like to do. Now even my 5 year old grandaughter asks if I can make her a quilt from some of the images as they appear on my computer :!: