I was trying to trace a pantograph onto the top of my quilt with this all over butterfly design from Willowleaf Studios (Butterfly Charm) that a very nice woman in the APQS longarm chat room sent a link to, thinking it would be perfect for my quilt with all the flowers in it.  But I just couldn’t get the design to show up with my light tracer through the darker fabrics and didn’t want to use quilting paper because it is really annoying to work with.  Then a lightbulb went off in my head, why not trace the entire pantograph, row by row, on the back of the quilt which I had made with a very see through white fabric, and quilt from the back?!  It was a little scarry because I had never bobbin quilted an entire quilt before, but I had seen bobbin embroidery demonstrated on Ricky Tim’s Grand Finale DVD using darker fabric and decorative thread on small sections of a quilt, so that gave me the confidence that this just might work!  This was the first time I was going to quilt an entire quilt from the back of the quilt, so my bobbin stitches had to be as pretty as the top stitches.  I carefully oiled the bobbin case with machine oil and a q-tip, put in a fresh needle, the kind recommended by Diane Gaudynski (Klasse Sharp 70/10) and used Superior Thread’s Bottom Line thread (a very fine 60 weight polyster thread) for the top and bobbin thread (a nice, shiny white), and used the thinnest loft of cotton batting I could find to eliminate bulk in the throat space for my regular size domestic sewing machine.  I also had to adjust the bobbin tension and ran several tests to make sure everything was feeling smooth and looking pretty on the front and the back of the quilt, and it worked like a charm. 

You can see what the back of the quilt looked like here after I traced the all-over pantograph design onto the back and pinned the layers together with safety pins.  I used the Dritz Mark-Be-Gone blue water soluble marking pen after reading about it from a book by Karen McTavish and she turned me into a believer that this product will not ruin your quilt if you use it correctly (rinse in cold water, no soap, and never expose it to the heat from the sun or an iron.) The nice thing about this design was that I could pin inbetween all the lines and rarely had to stop to take a pin out while I quilted.  Also, I never got an accidental tuck on the front of the quilt, which I worried about, but I think using the right number of pins seemed to keep things in order and it never happened.  I also used Harriet Hargraves method of layering the quilt together from her book, Heirloom Machine Quilting and I think that helped alot too.

I know alot of quilters feel too frustrated to quilt their own quilts and send them out to a long arm quilter.  I went through that myself, but I think I found a solution that doesn’t require a long arm, or even an extended arm, if you want to quilt your own top, for those quilts that you’ve decided only need a simple all over design like the kind used by long arm quilters with their pantographs.  I could not have done this, however, without a fabulous new product that came out on the market about a year ago, the Sew Slip, which is a silicon type pad that rests underneath the area I am quilting on.  It lets the quilt glide with ease while I move it around.  Without that product, I would be sending my tops to the long arm quilters myself!  Other things that I used which helped alot were a plastic, see-through free motion foot which helps you see where you are going better, and the Fons and Porter machine quilter gloves with little rubber grips on the bottom (in the photo) which I found at JoAnns.  

Finally, here is a photo of the finished quilt!  As you can see, it just puddles like water, perfect for cuddling on a cool, breezy summer afternoon.