Canuck Quilter: Rib Stitch

I've been very slow getting around to blog about quilts I finished last year. I finished Rib Stitch in December, just after a lovely, unusually early snowfall. The snow made for a pretty photoshoot!

Rib Stitch by Canuck Quilter Designs

I designed this in the wee hours of the morning at some point last year during a bout of insomnia. I booted up my EQ8 software and started playing with HST. Obviously, I ended up with more than just HST, but HST is what I started with and there are still quite a few of them in the quilt.

Making them a tad oversized and trimming down to perfect size is a bit tedious but worth it in the long run for accurate piecing and making everything fit together just right. That said, after trimming 189 HST, I decided to add triangles papers to the pattern to give you the option of making the HST more quickly with less fuss and trimming. If you're not familiar with making HST using triangle papers, you can read more about the technique here.

The two at a time method with trimming does give you a cute little trimming monster though!

Many of my patterns use stitch-and-flip techniques to avoid cutting and sewing individual triangles. I tried to come up with a way to do that for this design, but it would have used almost double the fabric and left me with a lot of "bonus" parts to figure out how to use up in something else. I gave in to the triangles! Look at all tose cute little triangles, lined up and waiting.

Sewing triangles requires an accurate 1/4" seam. Also, when you're first joining things together it may seem as though things aren't fitting together properly. Just trust my math and take a look at the detailed diagrams in the pattern that show you exactly how things should look, even if it seems wrong!

I chose to quilt Rib Stitch on my domestic Sewing machine using my walking foot. I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to quilt, but I knew it would start with stitching in the ditch, so I started with that. It might seem daunting to stitch in the ditch around all those triangles, but it really isn't difficult. The key was to not stitch every side of one triangle at a time, but rather stitch a series of lines in one direction all they way down or across, then stitch all the lines in another direction. Eventually there's stitching on all sides of each triangle without turning the quilt a bazillion times. (I discuss examples of this approach in my guild presentation "There's More than One Way to Quilt a Quilt". Please reach out to me if you think your guild would like me to visit by Zoom!)

After finishing all the ditch stitching, I had a better idea what I might quilt in the large parallelograms. I used my hera marker to mark and audition my idea. This tool makes a light indentation in the quilt sandwich, which is a great way to audition what the quilted texture will look like.

At this point I ran out of thread. Well, out of the color I needed. Of course this happened over the two days of the week when the local quilt shop is closed. I didn't want to interrupt my momentum on this project, so I moved on to quilting the borders, as I had matching thread for those. You can see below that the quilting in the borders is minimal, just straight line 1/4" in from each edge of the border.

Once that was done, I figured it was safe to bind the quilt. Generally, it's best to quilt the center first, then the borders, and only trim and bind the quilt after all the quilting is done. In this case the ditch stitching and the quilting in the borders seemed like enough to be sure the quilt wouldn't wave or shrink from additional quilting. So, I bound the quilt.

After a quick trip to the quilt shop for thread (did I buy too much, just to be safe? - yes, yes I did) I finished the quilting and headed out into the cold with my ever helpful quilt husband for a photo shoot. It did not go quite as planned, as the tape I had used to tape rods to the back of the quilt to keep it straight failed. I had done this with other quilts in the past with no problems. However, this photoshoot day was well below freezing. Even tape for "hard to stick surfaces" isn't rated for that cold. Go figure.

Tape failure

We regrouped without the rods, though the wind did move the quilt around a lot more without the weight of a rod at the bottom.

The lighting was great to sow off the quilted texture. Unfortunately, it also really showed off fold creases.

Here a look away from the creases so you can focus on the quilting.

This quilt, which I chose for the pattern cover, uses 4 fabrics plus a background. If you use seven fabrics, you could acheive a lovely ombre effect. Here's the seven-colour version featured in White Owl Textiles' winter catalog on page 90, pictured in their Botanical Sketchbook collection. (Check out Boxed Kisses on page 89 and Surface Curves on page 86 too! Botanical Sketchbook fabrics will arive in shops in early fall 2026.)