Sometimes when we spend a lot of time on embroidering something, we are afraid to quilt around it in case we mess it up. But when you have digitizing software, we can let go of our FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and create beautiful quilting designs around your embroidery and appliques.

After you have embroidered your design, don’t remove it from the hoop! You want it to stay there so that you can easily stitch the quilting.  And I like to use a bigger hoop than what is necessary for my embroidery so that I can put some batting and backing underneath it and secure it with my magnets.

Design from Re18 Hoop, available from your dealer.

So this is the design I’m working with today, a really pretty medallion from the RE18 hoop collection. I want to quilt around it, so I selected the design, clicked on the ‘Convert’ tool and chose ‘Ambience Quilting’.

The next thing that opens up is a box containing all kinds of options for Ambience Quilting.

Options box for Ambience Quilting

It will select an appropriate size for the quilting portion of the design. I usually will change those numbers so that my quilting can fill the hoop that I am using. There are three types of background quilting you can choose: Echo, Scroll and Stippling.

Echo Quilting

Scroll Quilting (it’s like a continuous echo)

Stippling

All of these quilting options can be edited, as well, from the Fill option of the Properties box, usually located on the right side of your screen. You can edit the density (how close the lines are together), the distance off set (or away) from your original design, and even choose decorative stitches if you want. Really, the possibilities are endless.

Now, I know you are dying to see this in “real life”, so here are some pics of some samples I did. But I can’t show you the whole thing lol, it’s a top secret design that will be showcased in our booth at Quilt Canada in June!

There’s a tiny bit of wash-away stabilizer peeking out here, I like to use it when embroidering really dense stitchouts.

You can click here to see the video on the steps to follow in Artistic Digitizer.

Until next time,

JanomeGirl