One of the techniques many new (and experienced) longarm quilters want to jump into is quilting feathers. Who can blame them? Feathers are a classic and beautiful quilting design. Unfortunately, they can be a little challenging. I’ve heard a few quilters say they simply can’t do feathers. Practice is the key to mastering feathers on your longarm, but it also helps to find the style of feather that speaks to you.

Did you realize there are a huge variety of quilting feathers? If not, I’d highly recommend you jump over to the APQS blog. We recently began a series on how to quilt different feathers. The series started with the traditional feathers and includes great step by step images and videos. Click here to learn about quilting traditional feathers. While I love a traditional feather, I find a little extra joy in adding a few extra flourishes to my feathers. 🙂

In the next post I show how to dress up your feathers by adding curls. I think curling feathers look so elegant! You can read the article about curling feathers here.

My latest post about feathers for APQS was all about quilting spineless feathers. You can see an example of this in the image above. I especially love using spineless feathers to travel across a quilt in a flourishing movement. Click here to see my article all about how to quilt spineless feathers.

As an extra thank you for following the Quilted Joy blog, I’ve got a few printables available just for you about feathers. I’ve drawn out step by steps instructions for how to quilt a variety of feathers. You can even get out some tracing paper and trace over my feathers until you’re comfortable with the path! Click the titles below for your free feather printables and be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you are notified when more tutorials come out!

Traditional and Curled Feathers

Spineless Feathers

Spineless Penguin Feathers

Are you wanting even more feather variations? Be sure to check out my DVD, Longarm Quilting with Angela Huffman Vol. 1. In addition to sharing my tricks to loading quilts and using pantographs, I teach how to quilt over 20 different feather variations! You can watch a preview of the classes on the DVD and order your own copy here.