Unicorn Garden QAL: Week 6 - Apples & Beavers

Hi friend! Welcome to WEEK 6 of our Unicorn Garden QAL!

Let’s start the same as every week. In case you’d like to review previous weeks’ resources please follow the links below:

WEEK 1 tips & tricks

WEEK 2 tips & tricks

WEEK 3 tips & tricks

WEEK 4 tips & tricks

WEEK 5 tips & tricks

I can’t believe that we have already reached the last week of our quilt along! Did it go by as fast for you as it did for me?

But before I show you the growing gallery of amazing unicorn quilts (scroll down if you can’t wait), let’s have a look at what you needed help with.

Your questions

I haven’t had a lot of questions this week. I’m hoping that this as a good sign and that your final quilt top assembly is going smoothly.

There were a few inquiries about quilting recommendations though. Without going into too much detail these would be my thoughts, depending on whether you’re quilting your unicorn yourself or sending her for a spa day at your favourite longarmer.

(Hand quilting entire quilts is not part of my current season of life. If you’re looking for advice with that, there are lots of great tutorials out there, for example by Suzy Quilts.)

Quilting your Unicorn Garden quilt on a domestic machine

I haven’t been overly adventurous when it comes to machine quilting. I personally enjoy the piecing process a lot more and handling an entire quilt sandwich is more a chore than pure joy for me. So I like to opt for designs that are straight forward and don’t require a lot of preparation. My go-to for a while now has been a diagonal grid. Firstly, I like that the diagonal seams do not interfere or compete with the mostly horizontal and vertical seams of my quilt top. So when angle and spacing of my quilted lines aren’t quite perfect, it is less noticeable. Secondly, I find quilting along the bias a lot more forgiving. Because the fabrics are more stretchy along the bias, it is easier to get a clean finish without tension issues between quilting lines. Especially with dense quilting, a slight shift of the layers of your quilt sandwich from row to row can result in a wavy structure of your quilt top. Quilting on the bias reduces this effect as compared to quilting along the grain of your fabric. I do not have a good picture of this myself and wouldn’t want to call anyone else out, lol. But I hope you know what I mean.

Typically I go for a 1.5″ spacing as I find it is not too loose but also not so dense that I spend days and weeks quilting. And it is also dense enough to skip the second direction if you really loose your motivation. Won’t tell you how many times this has happened to me…

Pantograph recommendations

Having my quilt samples quilted by a longarmer is still a relatively new experience for me. I’ve only started using this service option about a year ago. So this is by no means a comprehensive list as I am still exploring new pantographs with each quilt pattern. But a few edge-to-edge designs I’ve really liked are:

Triplet by Ambling Vines – a sweet and playful floral that goes with just about anything
Teeter Totter by Urban Elemenz – these alternating up and down arches make me think of rainbows, perfect for a unicorn quilt
Diamond Loops by Jessie Zeigler – a timeless and elegant diamond design, also more than worthy of a fairy tale quilt