My First Quilt-in-the-Hoop Project (And Everything I Learned)

This quilt is full of mistakes. It’s also one of my favorite things I’ve made this year. 

I’ve been learning how to use my Brother Stellaire sewing and embroidery machine, and I recently finished a simple quilt using Carolyn Friedlander’s newest collection, Memento. The pattern is Splashdown by Christina Cameli.

To create this 40″ x 40″ quilt top I used 1 charm pack from the Memento collection, 1.25 yards of Ruby Star Society’s Speckled in Macaron as the background, and .5 yards of Ruby Star Society’s Mini Starry in White on Natural to create the plus sign shape in the center of the quilt (.5 yards also left me with enough leftover fabric to bind my quilt with the same fabric).

NOTE: We are currently out of Mini Starry in White on Natural, but we think a good substitute would be Speckled in Sweet Cream.

After piecing the quilt, I decided to try the quilt-in-the-hoop feature on the Stellaire. 

I recently saw a photo on Instagram of a quilt with tightly spaced circles. The simple, organic prints in Memento felt like they were asking for equally simple quilting. The Stellaire has a “fill” function that lets you fill the area around an appliqué with stippling or a similar design. One of the fill designs is tight circles. I had never tried it, but I decided to go for it. The Stellaire assumes your appliqué is approximately 4 inches and your fill extends to a 6-inch square. To make the fill pattern match the idea in my head, I reduced the size of the “applique” to a tiny dot and extended the fill to the edges of the hoop, which was easy to do on the Stellaire screen. This allowed me to create my own in-the-hoop quilting motif using the Stellaire’s preprogrammed fill design. 

That “let’s just see what happens” attitude probably came from my Mom. She didn’t micromanage my creativity when I was a kid. She didn’t pretend every project was wonderful, but she also didn’t bat an eye when buying me the supplies I needed (within reason). She provided only minimal help when I asked for it, but basically let me figure things out for myself. She gave me many gifts during her short life, and allowing me to experiment without criticism was one of the most valuable.

I didn’t test how long the design would take to stitch out, and I didn’t measure how many hoopings I would require to cover the quilt’s width and length. I was excited and ready to go. Plus, my quilt was only 40” x 40”; how long could it take?

Sixteen hoopings. Eighteen minutes each. I immediately found out that I had a lot to learn about how to correctly hoop my quilt and accurately line up the sections of 3/4″ circles from one hooping to the next.  I have limited sewing time at home, so the quilting took me multiple weeks to complete.

The quilt police could probably point out every place the circles don’t quite line up.

I don’t really care. When I look at this quilt, I don’t see imperfect circles. I see everything I learned. And I camouflaged the uneven edges around the circles (because I didn’t do enough math at the beginning) with straight lines to the edge of the quilt. 

I learned how the Stellaire behaves. I learned where my hooping needs work. I learned that sixteen hoopings are about fifteen more than I wanted to do. And now I know I can do it (if I want to).

My “go for it” attitude gets a bad reputation in a craft that’s full of precision. We celebrate perfect points, perfectly matched seams, and hand-stitched bindings.

But most of us didn’t learn those things by waiting until we knew exactly what we were doing.

We learned by trying, making mistakes, asking questions, and trying again.

Have you ever started a sewing project that was a little over your head? I’d love to hear what you learned.