Adding personalisation to a quilt is something we’re asked about regularly in our studio, particularly for gifted special occasion quilts like baby and wedding quilts. It makes total sense as adding a name and date turns a quilt into something much more meaningful.
Whenever I make a quilt for someone (which, to be fair, isn’t very often now), I always try to include a name and/or date. Most recently, I made a baby quilt for my niece born in 2025, and for me it wouldn't feel complete without that personal detail stitched in. I made a few practice quilts for her as I was testing the Woodlands Creatures design at the time, but I couldn't gift these practices because they didn't have an embroidered name. And I know a lot of quilters do something similar, often adding an embroidered label to the back. To me it feels like an artists signature.
Up until now, for me adding lettering on a longarm machine has been a manual process. I’d usually type out a name in Adobe Illustrator, trace over it, import it into Art and Stitch, export it as a PAT file, then load it into my Innova longarm quilting machine to stitch. It works, but it’s time-consuming and not especially efficient if you’re doing this regularly, so I don't do it regularly.
Because of that, we’ve wanted for a long time to create a cursive alphabet quilting pattern that could be used as a digital pantograph. The goal was to design a fully connected script that works seamlessly as a longarm quilting pattern, allowing you to quilt letters without having to design them from scratch each time.
And we’ve finally done it! Our cursive alphabet edge to edge quilting pattern is now available as a digital download on our site.
Designing this wasn’t straightforward. The challenge with any cursive quilting pattern is making sure every letter connects smoothly to the next without looking clunky or disjointed. Designing a full alphabet was a mammoth task which is why it’s taken us a while to get right.
But, we now have a continuous alphabet pantograph that allows you to quilt flowing script across your quilt while still working in a way that feels familiar on a longarm. It's designed sort of like an edge to edge where each end starts and stops on the same horizontal axis point, so they can all be joined up smoothly.
Each letter needs imported individually to your software and then joined to create names or text. On our Innova with AutoPilot, there’s a simple way to connect elements, and most longarm quilting software offers something similar. I wish I had experience on all longarm quilting software however I don't, so to enable you to give it a little test prior to purchasing, we’ve included a free download on our site so you can check compatibility with your system before purchasing.
When it comes to stitching, this behaves slightly differently from a standard edge-to-edge quilting pattern because the detail is finer. We’ve designed the alphabet at a larger scale (around 3" for uppercase letters) so you can scale down without losing clarity. In practice, we recommend stitching between 50 - 100% scale. The smaller lowercase letters are approximately 1" at full size, and reducing them too far can affect readability.
We’ve been stitching this at around 12-15 SPI, which gives a clean result. As always, a fresh needle makes a noticeable difference - something we all know, but don’t always act on.
If you’ve been looking for a way to add lettering to your quilts without the usual setup time, this alphabet quilting pattern for longarm machines is a straightforward way to do it, while still achieving a smooth, professional finish.
I really do hope this will be genuinely useful within the longarm quilting world as I do think we're going to end up using it a lot in our studio. It'd be good, maybe, to teach in the future about how to cut up an edge-to-edge to create space to input the pattern, as that's what we'd do in here. It doesn't work with every E2E obviously,
Anyway good luck, and if you do stitch anything using our alphabet please tag us on Instagram @longarm.quilting.glasgow as we'd love to see what you make!
Deborah
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