Ok, raise your hand if you are a perfect piecer. I’ll wait haha. (….crickets…) We all make imperfections while piecing. Maybe our 1/4″ is slightly off. Or our fabric stretched, or “sucked in” too much while pressing. The point is, at times we all will have blocks that are inconsistent with each other, even after they are trimmed and pressed and sewn into a completed top. This can be very frustrating during the quilting process, especially if we are custom quilting it using the Janome Quiltmaker Pro Longarm with ProStitcher. I’d like to walk you through how to quilt that wonky block, using the ProStitcher software.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I drew the wonkiest block I could on the black fabric. I really wanted you to be able to see that it’s out of alignment.
It’s really out of whack lol. Most of the time when you are quilting your quilts, the blocks that are out of sync with the rest of your quilt top aren’t going to be that bad. But they will be noticeable if you are trying to fit a quilting design into that block and it’s not straight or lined up properly. So what do you do? Using these simple steps, you can make a wonky block look perfect.
In Pro Stitcher on the tablet of your Jnaome Quiltmaker Por longarm, tap on the ‘Area’ tab. Move the needle to the top left corner of your wonky block, and tap ‘Multi-point’. Continue this process until you have created an area that is the same as your wonky block.
You may ask yourself, why do I do this? Why can’t I just fiddle with the design until it’s how I like it? Well, the short answer is ‘yes you can fiddle with it’. But really, there is a better and much easier way to ensure exact placement of your design on your quilt. Creating an area tells Pro Stitcher where you want the quilting to be. Otherwise, it may start stitching way over on the left side where you have a beautiful applique that you really didn’t want to stitch over.
Once you have your area, you can open your chosen design. I like to use this leaf design to illustrate how it works. As you can see in the picture below, the design does not fit in the block.
In Pro Stitcher, there are always multiple ways to manipulate designs and layouts so that you can work with the software the way that you personally want to. So I could use the ‘Transform’ function and play with the design manually. Using the blue boxes on the edges, I could click and drag to my heart’s content (and probably use up an hour of my quilting time too!).
However, there is a better way that fits that design into your area with a few taps. I’d like to introduce you to my friend “Skew”. She lives under the ‘Modify’ tab, and is the second to last tool on the options ribbon. When you tap ‘Modify’, then ‘Skew’, you’ll find three options come up on the right sidebar area, like this:
Using the sidebar, you can try either of the Skew options to see which one fits your design the best into the selected area.
Skew 1 is not the option I’m looking for. I want that leaf design to go all the way into the corners of my block.
Skew 2 is what I’m looking for. It manipulated the design to reach each corner of my block. Yay!
The “Skew” tool is one that I use over and over again while quilting on the Janome Quiltmaker Pro. It makes custom quilting so much easier, because I can simply mark the area using the needle, open the design, and fit it into my wonky block. But how does it look in real life? I know you are dying to know! Click here to watch my YouTube video!
The actual stitch out of the leaf design inside my wonky block
I hope you’ve learned something today, and I also hope that you’ve been inspired to visit your local dealer to see the Janome QMP!
Janome Life 