HELP Quilting Words & Letters!
 

I am about to start on my sisters baby quilt for her first grandchild. I am wanting to make in more personal by quilting the babys name, dob & weight down the inside borders. Has anyone else did this or does anyone have any advice for me. Thank you

If you haven't had any experience doing embroidery, take a look at YouTube or About to find some stitches and alphabets you like. One way is to hand-write the information with a washable quilting pencil and then use a running stitch along the writing. I'd recommend that if you do this is to do the embroidery on the border strip using a hoop before you attach the border to the quilt.
I'm currently appliqueing the child's name in 3" letters on a border of a quilt I'm making. Wish I'd chosen smaller embroidery instead. Appliqueing "P" is hard ;o)

I would pencil the letters & then use one of the decorative stitches on my machine or hand embroider the letters.

I wasn't wanting then to stand out like a embroidery would. I was just wanting in to be in the quilting design. I already have the quilt top finished and loaded on the long (short) arm to quilt today. I don't want to take away from the quilt & I am just wanting a extra touch for my sister to know who the quilt was made for.

Great idea please post the finished project.

Make up a couple of practice batts.....inexpensive muslin works great for this.
Draw a set of parallel lines on one batt, maybe a half inch or inch apart.
Set up your machine for free-motion quilting.
Then practice "writing" your abc's with your machine on the batt "tablet."
Then practice writing your name.
You may want to draw the letters first with a washable marker and stitch over them, but after a little practice you'll be able to do it freehand.
Be sure to remove the marker to see your progress.

I have a quilting friend who always stitches her name into her quilting instead of putting a label on the back.

Thanks for your help Karen. I am heading upstairs now to start quilting. I will be sure to post some pictures. I am also going to post some pictures of my yard sale finds from last week:-) Happy Quilting everyone.

Here's how I've done it. I find a font on my computer that I like the looks of - a script font works best so you can connect the letters. Print out the words the size that will fit in the border. Then trace the outside of the letters onto Golden Threads paper, trying to make a continuous path as much as possible. (Golden Threads is a tracing type paper made for machine quilting. You could probably use regular tracing paper if you can't find the Golden Threads). Either pin the tracing onto the quilt, or spray basting spray on the wrong side of the paper and stick it on. Then stitch through the paper. You will have to tear the paper away but it works really nicely.

I should say I've used this method on my longarm machine, but I don't see why it wouldn't work on a sit down machine as well.

One thing to test first is the pen/pencil you use to trace with. The heat of the needle going through the fabric will sometimes transfer the markings to your fabric. For that reason, I like to use a marking tool that I know is removable such as the blue washout pens.

Here is part of a border I did this way:

I just wrote the poem with thread, in a FMQ method. Not sure if the music notes etc will show in this picture [ATTACH=CONFIG]327221[/ATTACH]

I like to write things into my quilts, especially for the kids I quilt for...and I do it with my longarm. Doesn't take much practice and it adds a fun thing to "their" quilt. I may write "I love you" and the child's name, birthdate, why I made the quilt, and any other thing I think might be fun for him/her. They seem to have fun finding out new things about their quilt each time they use it.