I want to share a fun project that you’ll be able to make quickly and it’s perfect to do with your children or grandchildren. It involves a bit of stitching, a bit of colouring, and some free motion or ruler quilting.
Here’s what you’ll need for this project:
- A simple colouring design. You can find lots of free colouring designs online or take a page out of your favourite colouring book. You want a design that is simple without many details.
- Solid or solid-ish fabric for your quilt top
- Fabric for borders (or not) and hanging tabs (or not)
- Batting and backing fabric the same size as your project top (including borders if you are adding these)
- Crayola crayons
- Paper towels
- Usual sewing supplies
- Janome Continental M7 with ruler work foot and free motion quilting foot
- Janome AcuFeed Flex Ditch Quilting SD foot (optional but very helpful)
If you want to add borders to your project, do this first, and then trace your design onto your top fabric using a pencil. Be sure that you’ve centered your design on the fabric.
Once your design is traced, the fun begins! You can now enjoy being a kid again by colouring the design as desired. I like to print off several copies of the design and try different colours until I have decided on the ones I want to use on the fabric. Don’t colour the background – that’s where the quilting goes!
When you’re finished colouring, cover the design with a paper towel and iron it with a dry iron until no further colour comes off on the paper towel.
Rather than adding a binding, you’ll be constructing the project using the pillowcase method. If you aren’t familiar with this technique, click here for information on how to do it. You may want to add hanging tabs or similar at this stage. I used the Janome Professional Grade AcuFeed Flex HP2 foot with the AcuFeed Feeding System on the Janome Continental M7 to evenly stitch all the layers together. It really helps to make sure that the fabrics and batting don’t shift during the construction process.
Now your project is ready for some quilting. For my project, I stitched in the ditch between the top and the border fabrics to stabilize it. I used the Janome AcuFeed Flex Ditch Quilting SD foot with the AcuFeed Feeding System on the Janome Continental M7 to do this. Worked like a charm!
To emphasize the design, I free motion quilted around the details at least 3 times with black thread. This is a great way to get comfortable with free motion quilting. Because you go over your quilted lines several times, there’s no pressure to try to make your stitch length consistent – no one will ever be able to tell!
Once the design part was completed, it was time to do some quilting in the background.
As my design was candles with Christmas ornaments, I decided to do some straight line ruler quilting around the candles and then some wavy lines near the bottom of the design. I used the QR Ruler Work foot which comes with the Janome Continental M7. and one of the many free motion quilting feet which are also included with the machine for this step. Quick and simple!
If you’ve added borders to your project, you might want to add some additional stitching in this area. This is the perfect time to use one of the many decorative stitches on the Janome Continental M7. There is a really cute snowflake design which would work well if your design is holiday or winter-themed.
Now that your project is finished, the toughest part is…do you keep it for yourself or gift it? I’ll let you decide that. 😉
Happy creating from Kim Jamieson-Hirst of Chatterbox Quilts, a Janome Canada Artisan in Calgary, Alberta.
Janome Life 
Love my m7 thank you for this post and other ones that you have posted
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Thank you sew much for your feedback, Thelma! Kim always does a fabulous job of sharing the Janome love! Happy Sewing!
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