I can't believe we're quilting our 10th walking foot quilting design today! Super Star is as bright and beautiful as the name implies. This is a wonderful design to cover your quilt with All Over Style Quilting because it spirals out from the center so it feels easier the longer you quilt it.
Learn how to quilt Super Star in this new walking foot quilting tutorial:
Click Here to find the book Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day. Inside you'll find 30 fun walking foot quilting designs with tips on how to use them in real quilts. This book also includes the quilt pattern for Marvelous Mosaic, the quilt we're making together with these squares!
Tips for Quilting Super Star with Walking Foot Quilting
To begin quilting Super Star, it really helps to mark the starting star shape on your quilt with a fabric marking pencil. This is just a basic overlapping star shape with straight lines that you probably drew a thousand times when you were a kid.
Once you draw the starting star, just pick a point to begin quilting and pull up your thread tails to the quilt surface. This stops the bobbin thread from making an ugly mess on the back of the quilt and ensures your first stitch looks great. Leaving nice long thread tails also allows you to easily tie off and bury them in the middle of your quilt later.
Just a quick reminder about my machine settings:
For walking foot quilting I always set the stitch length to 1.5 mm and place a Free Motion Glider on the table to the left of the feed dogs.
However, for this Marvelous Mosaic Quilt, I have Minky fabric on the back which likes to grip the machine and table. When using this fabric on the back, I increase the stitch length to 2.5 mm.
Lining up the Lines off the Points
As you can see in the video, the trickiest part of quilting Super Star with walking foot quilting is quilting down far enough in the points to turn the corner. You have to stitch down the point far enough so when you rotate, the edge of your foot or guide bar is lined up with the next line of the star.
At first I would guesstimate the right spot to rotate the quilt, but this ended up creating a lot of rotating back and forth and fiddling to get the spacing just right. Of course, I was being pretty picky here because I wanted the lines of the Super Star to be perfectly spaced 1/2-inch apart. If you're not feeling so picky, this would be a lot faster to quilt!
To speed things up I tried marking straight lines radiating out from the starting star points. It was a good guide to stop and check the position of the foot, but it still required some rotating and stitching.
The fastest way to quilt this design with the least amount of rotation and double checking yourself is to mark it completely over the quilt surface with a marking pencil. Yes, taking the time to mark the quilt is a bit tedious, but once it's marked, the quilting will fly by because there won't be a question of where you stop and turn the quilt. You just stitch on the lines and bing, bang, boom, you're done!
Where will Super Star work best in your quilts?
This design will work great stitched over an entire quilt. If you have a baby quilt that needs a fast, fun quilting design, try quilting it with Super Star on a large scale. The more space you place between your lines of quilting, the faster you will secure the layers of the quilt together.
Just how much quilting do you need on your quilt? That all depends on your quilt batting in the middle. Learn more about batting and how to pick the best type for any project in the Basting Basics workshop.
Super Star won't be a great choice to quilt in individual blocks on a big quilt, at least if you're quilting with your walking foot. As you can tell in the video, it requires a lot of rotation to stitch all the lines and that would be challenging if you're quilting a single small block in the side of a big quilt.
If you want to place Super Star in a block like that, switch over to free motion quilting so you don't have to rotate the quilt so much. I originally shared Super Star as a free motion quilting tutorial. This is a much older video, quilted on a much smaller scale, but you can see how it works with this different style of quilting:
No matter which way you quilt it, or on what style of machine, Super Star is going to make a great addition to your quilting design toolbox. Give it a try today and see what you think!
Would you like to make a fun quilt while learning how to quilt many designs?
That's what we're doing with Marvelous Mosaic. Learn how to quilt 20 walking foot quilting designs and in the end we'll put them together to create a large, throw sized quilt. Find the Marvelous Mosaic quilt pattern in the book Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day. This book is available in the following formats so it's easy and convenient to follow along.
Click Here to find all the walking foot quilting videos I've shared so far. We're making three quilts together from this book and you can join in the fun and follow along anytime!
Let's go quilt,
Leah Day
