Machine Quilting With Style Blog Hop with Christa Watson

Today we are joined by Christa Watson from ChristaQuilts for a guest post!  Christa is a long time Aurifil fan and supporter.  The first time I had the pleasure of meeting Christa was in Austin at Quiltcon.  Her passion for quilting and quilters was astounding!  Her ideas, creativity and energy are limitless.  It is no wonder at all that her hard work has made it into a wonderful new book Machine Quilting With Style for Martingale so you can learn her great techniques to achieve beautiful quilting.

Hi everyone! It’s Christa here from ChristaQuilts.com and I’m so excited to be guest posting today. I’ve been a fan of Aurifil threads for a few years now and proudly use them in all of my quilts for both piecing and machine quilting. I love each step of the quilt-making process and enjoy that feeling of completion that comes after I’ve taken the last stitch.

I was a lucky winner of an Aurifil thread box when Alex came to town on a quilt shop tour!

Although I’ve been teaching others how to quilt in my local area for several years, it’s long been a dream of mine to share my passion for quilting with a wider audience. I recently had the opportunity to write my debut book, Machine Quilting with Style which includes not only 12 fun piecing patterns, but also step-by-step instructions on how to quilt each one. I do everything on my home sewing machine and most of my methods are easily adaptable to any type of machine you own.

My style tends to be a bit more on the modern side, yet my machine quilting techniques will work well on any type of quilt. In fact, it’s so fun to teach a class of students and see how they interpret my designs in their own unique ways!

Writing a book was a dream come true. It was so fun, I’m going to write more!

I know what you may be thinking—it can be a little scary to dive in and quilt your own quilts. But I have confidence in you and I know you can do it! The trick is to let go of the notion of perfection and try both walking-foot quilting and free-motion quilting techniques.

Selecting threads for machine quilting is as much fun as choosing fabrics!

In the book I share a little more in-depth information about batting and thread plus I’ve included tips to help you overcome the fear attached with those three little words: “quilt as desired!” I like to give a lot of information about my quilts, so I’ve even included the type of batting and which threads I’ve used for each quilt. I also tell you how much thread you’ll need for machine quilting each one. If you are like me, you hate to run out of thread in the middle of a project, right?

Rain from Machine Quilting With Style – quilted with the threads shown above.

Here are a couple more closeups of some of the quilting from Machine Quilting With Style, photography courtesy of Brent Kane

Detail of spirals and switchbacks quilted with Aurifil cotton thread.

Detail of square spirals quilted with Aurifil variegated cotton.

I want to personally thank Alex and Kim for their support in my quilting journey, and the whole Aurifil team for producing such lovely threads with which to work!

–Christa
ChristaQuilts.com