Christmas in July: Free Reindeer Q-matic Design

We are halfway through the year. All quilters know what that means: Christmas in July! In this blog post, I’ll be sharing two free reindeer patterns with you. A reindeer Q-matic design and a fun Christmas pillow pattern.

Christmas in July

It might be the middle of summer right now, but planning-wise, it’s the perfect time to start on your Christmas projects.

Last year I hosted a Christmas Quilt Along with an Advent Calendar. Every day, during Advent, we would open a present from the box. These presents could contain a piece of the pattern, fabric, thread, quilting notions, and everything needed to complete the whole project by December 24th.

What we were sewing was a complete mystery to all participants. It was such a fun project to host!

To celebrate Christmas in July, I would love to share the reindeer pillow pattern with you.

Click here to go to the free Rudolph the reindeer pillow pattern that we made last year.

Advent calendar 2024

Orders for the 2024 Sugaridoo Advent Calendar will be open from July 12-14. A brand new (secret!) project, which we will be sewing together starting on the 1st of December this year.

Only during this weekend you can order your Advent box, so if you’re interested, hop over to the Sugaridoo shop!

GIVEAWAY I’ll be giving away two quilted reindeer blankets during the pre-order weekend. By pre-ordering the Advent calendar you’ll automatically enter the raffle to win one of the blankets.

Rudolph the reindeer pattern for the Q-matic

The Q-matic can be used to beautifully quilt complex quilts. But another thing the automated quilting system on the Q 24 longarm is really good at is turning simple fabric into something amazing!

With our reindeer pillow from last year in mind, I came up with an overall reindeer pattern that can be quilted with the Q-matic.

Isn’t it cute? You can download it for free from the Sugaridoo website. This will give you a .BQM file which can be imported directly to your Q-matic system.

Materials

The great thing with this project is that it won’t take you months to make. Here’s what you need.

• Piece of cotton fabric (as big as you want your blanket to be)
• Piece of fleece (slightly larger than the cotton)
• Thread in the color of the fleece
• Thread in the color of the cotton
• The free Reindeer pattern
• BERNINA longarm + Q-matic

Preparation

Load the fleece on your frame as the backing fabric. Try to stretch it as little as possible.

Next, you can place your cotton fabric on top as the top of the quilt. I did not load my cotton fabric onto the bar of the frame but left it floating. Just secure the top and sides as you go with basting stitches.

You can put a layer of batting in between if you’d like to add warmth to the blanket.

Quilting

After you download the reindeer Q-matic design and load it into your Q-matic system, you are ready for quilting.

Mark your safe area, and enter the size of your quilt. Then you select the reindeer design from the ‘Customize Design Center’ and place it on your quilt.

Multiply the Reindeer pattern

Use the Multiply option to fill the whole space of your quilt.

First, you will repeat the design ‘Across’ as many times as you need for the size of your quilt. It should be bigger than the quilt size, we will trim it later.

Then you increase the ‘Down’ by one. Now play with the offset and vertical pacing until you have a design that you are happy with. I tried to center the arc of the design in the middle of the reindeer in the row above.

Then you can increase the ‘Down’ number to as many as you need to fill your quilt. 

Trim

This design will be quilted from left to right. If you reverse every other row (using the ‘Reverse sew’ option) you can quilt a few rows in one go. 

After reversing every other row, select the top row. Click ‘Connect’ and then select ‘Link’. Then you select the rows that fit in your safe area and click the green check mark. 

Now you can use the ‘Trim’ option to trim the sides to the width of your quilt.

Go!

Hit that start button and just watch the Q 24 do its magic.

It was so fun to see that first reindeer pop up on the bar after the first rows were quilted. Continue sewing all the rows until the whole piece of fabric is quilted.

Finishing

To finish the project I used the front cotton fabric as binding. This way I did not had to cut and piece a binding for it. It was a perfect quick option to finish the project. Cut the edges off the blanket, make sure to cut the corners to 90 degrees.

Then I just ‘hemmed’ the blanket by folding over the red cotton fabric to the fleece side. I googled ‘quilt backing as binding’ for some tutorials on how to get the nice mitered corners. I found that the corners got a little bulky. So I cut away a little 1 x 1 inch square from the fleece in every corner.

Merry Christmas in July!

There you go. A super fun Christmas present to make on the BERNINA Q-matic. Happy Quilting! Irene