Best longarm quilting design ideas for beginners

There is nothing quite like that moment when you open the box to your new APQS longarm machine. It takes your breath away! Once that beautiful machine gets out of the box and onto your quilting frame, you might start to feel a little intimidated. Using a longarm feels a lot like doodling with a big pencil only you are using thread and not lead. Oh, and instead of paper you are doodling on fabric.

There are some designs that are perfect for beginners to get their sea legs and become accustomed to longarm machine quilting. Thankfully we have created some great videos that will walk you through the best designs so you can grow your skills quickly and easily.

Most folks start with a very basic meander line. You may be familiar with this pattern if you’ve worked with free motion quilting on your sit down domestic machine. In this video we double up that line and cross over it in order to easily create a more complicated look that is incredibly simple to achieve.

One of the first goals you’ll have when using your longarm is to get used to how to use the momentum of the machine to carry you around curves. The best way to learn how to do that is to make lots and lots of loops. In this video we will walk you through a basic loopy all over design that you can use on lots of fun quilts.

Of course, in addition to all over designs you’ll want to have a few border and sashing motifs that you can use initially. In the next video we will explore the basic lower case cursive letter “e” and “l” to show how you have been training your brain since fourth grade for this quilting design!

Understanding the difference between a hook and a curl will help you learn other designs down the road. In this video we will look at how to create these essential designs that you’ll use for dozens of other designs down the road.

We hope you enjoyed the videos above. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel so you are notified every time we post a new tutorial video. Take a look at all of our other quilting videos for dozens of other great designs you can use with your APQS longarm quilting machine!