Echoing is an easy machine quilting design that adds a fun, rippled texture to your quilts. We can use this machine quilting design for both Walking Foot Quilting and Free Motion Quilting.
When using your walking foot to echo, you can use the edge of the foot as a guide to space your lines apart. The base of the walking foot will set the spacing and your machine will feed the quilt through the machine at a steady, even pace to produce beautiful, even stitches.
The limitation with walking foot style echoing is you will need to stop and reposition the quilt often in order to echo quilt around complex shapes or tight areas. Just remember to slow down and take your time if the design you are echoing is complex with a lot of tight curves.
Learn how to echo quilt around the central design of a t-shirt quilt block in this video:
One important tip from the video - if you decide to echo quilt around a design over and over on a big quilt, make sure to get started working in a clockwise direction.
As you work your way out of the block, the quilting will become progressively easier because less of the block will need to slide through the arm of the machine.
When you quilt counter-clockwise, the feeling is the opposite. It feels like more and more bulk of the quilt is in the machine because technically you are quilting on the opposite side of the shape so everything you've finished quilting will also be sliding through the arm of the machine.
Don't panic if you get started in the right direction! Our t-shirt quilt blocks are small enough that it won't matter which direction you quilt in. This is most important when quilting larger quilts with big shapes that are echoed many times.
Find more fun walking foot designs to try on your home sewing machine!
