Tech Sunday - Ending Quilting at the Bottom of a Quilt

Trying to hit the bottom of a quilt perfectly is something that we all struggle with.   If my pattern is a little over, I try not to stress over it.  But what if I made a mistake and the pattern is going to quilt six inches into the batting.  Or worse, you are afraid you are going to stitch onto your leaders.     There is a way that you can get the quilting to stop at the bottom of the quilt without distorting the pattern.   

Normally by the time you realize that you have a problem you have forwarded the quilt to where the bottom of the quilt is in the quilt-able  area of your frame and you will have already marked the quilt to align the next row.   So, you can see the bottom edge of the quilt.  Now you are going to reset your safe area.   

Tap on the tool box, then on the Set Safe Area button.   The move the machine to the top left where you would normally mark the safe area and tap the button.  When you move to mark the bottom right, you want to put your hopping foot so that it is just off  the bottom right of the quilt.  It can be as far right as you want it to be, the important part is to set the bottom line at the bottom of the quilt.   

Once you do this, use the alignment mark to set the row.  The background of the quilting area will stay pink.  In this case, that is okay.  You really are telling the software that the pattern won't fit in the area.  If you think about it from Quilt Path's point of view, you are saying I have a smaller space available to you.   

You can optimize the jump-stitches, if you have any on the sides.  The ones on the bottom that are causes by us chopping off the pattern will not optimize out.  Here is why, what you are actually telling Quilt Path is that you are quilting part of the pattern on this pass, but you want it to quilt the rest of the pattern on the next pass.   Logically you would not want the program to quilt a straight line across where the patterns join to draw attention to the fact that you told it to quilt the pass in two parts.  In our case, we are going to just stop quilting once it finishes the partial pattern, but Quilt Path does not know that.  

There is one more thing that I do before I tell it to quilt this row.  I go into Settings and take the check off of the Pause at Trim Lines button.  

This will cause Quilt Path to automatically move to the next sewing line without you having to tell it to.  

For a printable version of this post, click here.  

This post first appeared on www.ThreadWaggle.com