Quilting Machine

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Equipment for Longarm Quilting

The longarm quilting machine comes equipped with a sewing machine head, a worktable, several fabric rollers, and a metal frame. The overall dimensions of the machine can range from ten to fourteen feet in length by two-and-a-half to four feet in depth. The machine comes equipped with a table region. The table size can range from ten to fourteen feet in length. Larger table sizes can accommodate up to king sized quilts. Typically, the table contains a flat region on which a layer of thin, clear plastic lies, in which patterns and other designs to follow can be placed.

The sewing machine head is large and made of industrial strength metal. It can be either hand-guided or computer guided, with controls to guide the machine on both sides in either instance. For a full range of movement, the sewing machine head is placed on wheels that run on metal tracks along the frame of the machine. The sewing machine head can also come with a laser pointer, which can be used to guide the quilter along patterns placed underneath the clear plastic region of the table. The hand-guided machine head contains handles onto which the quilter can guide the machine along the fabric to sew the design of choice. The computer-guided machine head is hooked up to a computer system that allows the quilter to choose the design of choice to be sewn onto the fabrics. With the push of a button on the computer's keyboard, the longarm sewing machine will sew the chosen design onto the quilt without any physical assistance by the longarm quilter.

The frame of the machine consists of several rolling bars onto which layers of the quilt are placed. On one side of the machine, two rollers, known as the feeder bars, are present with a muslin leader onto which the backing and the quilt top can be attached. Material is attached by sewing pins or sewing zippers to the muslin leaders and then the material is stretched tight over the belly bar, which ensures that the layered material is smooth and taut according to the sewers’ desires.

The backing of the quilt is attached by sewing pins or zippers to a third roller, known as the “take-up” roller. The take-up roller is the region onto which the quilted regions can be moved to allow the quilter to gain access to a new region of quilt top. The backing, quilt top, and batting are commonly basted together by a single-row of stitching, but can also be pinned together onto the muslin leader on the take-up roller. The stretched region of fabric that spans between the take-up roller and the feeder rollers is the area over which the fabric layers are actually sewn together into the finished product. The longarm quilting machine typically comes with electronic controls that allow the user to adjust the fabric that spans the area over which the machine runs.

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