Marking a Quilt

I'm not sure this really warrants a blog post, but hey, it might help somebody out there.  All quilts don't need marking.  If you are outlining each piece, you don't need to mark them.  However, on this particular quilt I wanted to do allover fan quilting.  There are several ways to do this. Some people completely freehand these fans, but I wasn't quite comfortable with that, so I compromised and freehanded in between each marked line.  Because I wanted all my fans to be facing the same direction, I started in the bottom righthand corner and marked one horizontal row at a time.  I quilted that row, then marked the next row.  Here's how I marked the last row.

First, I laid the quilt on the floor and put something hard underneath it (in my case it was an 18-inch square of the stuff that clipboards are made of -- that's just what I happened to have).

Then I lined up my template (which I made out of cardboard -- you can buy templates already made, but a lot of times it's just as easy to make your own).

Next I took my sharpened chalk pencil and marked my lines.  Keep your sharpener handy.  It doesn't take long to wear these chalk pencils down.  (A note on the chalk pencils:  on this quilt I usually used white, but in a few places the white didn't show up and I switched to silver.  White and silver should meet most of your needs.)

Then I took the template off and filled in any gaps.

First fan marking completed.

Next I lined my template up against the just-finished markings and repeated the process, making sure the hard surface underneath the quilt was lined up with where I was marking.

Another fan completed.

I did this across the row, then picked the quilt up and laid it back in the frame and started quilting.  Simple, no?