Quilting on Dark Fabrics
The headline may make you wonder, “What’s the big deal? Isn’t it the same as quilting on light fabrics but with darker thread?”
As I found out recently, there are some challenges associated with dark fabrics!
Quilting on white or light fabrics shows up more easily because of the light that gets reflected by the 3D nature of the quilted areas. The shapes and contours from stitching are highlighted in relief as light gets bounced off higher areas and absorbed by areas in between them.
With dark fabrics, light is absorbed more overall due to the nature of dark colors. The 3D expectation of quilted areas does not always materialize, possibly leaving an appearance of a flat, unquilted or minimally quilted area.
I decided to shore up my courage recently and try stitching with contrast thread. Bright green on black ought to show up, right?
I did a test on a small quilt sandwich in black fabric, using a ruler quilting template for leaves made with free motion quilting. Though it wasn’t perfect, I felt it looked good enough overall for me to use this vine of leaves for the entire border on each side of a quilt.
What I hadn’t kept in mind was how much easier it is to work on a small rectangular sample versus an entire full size quilt! The heaviness of the quilt causes significant drag on the quilt as one tries to move it past the needle, executing each leaf with the ruler template.
The small differences are not very noticeable when using the same thread color as the fabric or just a small level of contrast. But with a larger contrast, the discrepancies were pronounced, at least jarring enough to me not to want to keep that stitching visible!
Time for the dreaded seam ripper! But trying to pick out an entire border of stitches was near impossible, especially because sometimes in free motion quilting, the stitch size can become quite small, becoming virtually impossible to remove.
Using a quilt-as-you-go technique, I ended up attaching a new border and backing section to that border and was “back to the ol’ drawing board”.
This time, I decided to try a more freeform style of leaf done freehand, one that wouldn’t require such even sizing and spacing. It was liberating to doodle with the machine while feeding my sample through! What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, the same issue of drag due to the weight of the quilt caused the variations in the leaf shape and size to be too noticeable to be aesthetically pleasing. I had the sense to stop after just six leaves this time, a number the dreaded seam ripper could successfully remove.
My takeaway: when free motion quilting on a domestic sewing machine on dark fabrics, it may be best to use matching or low contrast color thread. What is lost in the ability of the quilting to show up is gained in the harmonious appearance of the stitching!
