Within the Frame: A Short Guide to Working a Rocking Quilting Stitch for the Flat Frame.

By Deborah McGuire

The frame evolved to give tension and balance to a unique utility stitch. Today we call it ‘rocking stitch’ but it was simply referred to as ‘quilting’ in the past.

It requires the needle to be rocked between (most commonly) either of the first two non-thumb digits protected by two metal thimbles (one on top, one below) to give even and regular, fast rows of stitching.

It is a technique predicated in haptic balance, where the pressures of the needle are ‘rocked’, passed backwards and forwards as the tip of the needle is controlled as it passes through the three layers of the fabric.

It is a stitch perfectly evolved in union with the frame. Conventional stitching is almost impossible to execute on the tighter tension of a frame. However, the frame should not be tensioned drum-taut like embroidery, you will adapt your own sense of how much ‘give’ you prefer to yield easy flowing stitches.

Rocking gives a regular and rapid stitch, the size is a function of the balance between the two digits. Aim to get regular stitches and size will follow naturally.

It is easiest to quilt towards you. Begin by drafting a strippy quilt design with an undulating curved pattern such as the one shown, which was a common utility quilting treatment on many quilts from the 1860s until the 1920s.

Rocking stitch is a technique most easily leant by imitation. If you can take a class do, if not then ask a friend to demonstrate, or the internet is your friend. This is a skilled haptic technique, akin to the balance required to learn to ride a bike, it rewards patient practice and is refined by consistent labour.

Remember that old quilts show a huge variation of different shapes and sizes of stitches. It is a relatively modern obsession that quilting stitches be small. Most makers required only that their quilting stitches be efficient. Try to show yourself the same grace.

Authors in the first half of the twentieth century offered these tips;

‘the first finger of the left hand must be held under the frame to be pricked each time the needle pierces the three layers of material in this way securing them together with such perfect regularity of stitching to make it impossible to say from which side the quilting was sewn. Evenness in spacing the stitches is a criterion of good quilting and can only be achieved gradually, after a considerable amount of patient practice.’ Elizabeth Hake, 1937.

‘the right thumb is extended at every stitch to press the material down slightly ahead of where the needle will come up. There’s an art in the stitch. A skilled quilter works quickly and with rhythm, which produces true straight lines or flowing curves. This rhythm is perhaps the most important feature of the technique’. Mavis FitzRandolph, 1954.