All too often, quilters find themselves working in closets, spare bedrooms, garages, or basements with only a bare light bulb or two to push back the gloom. Yet machine quilting is detailed work that requires an intense focus on your sewing machine’s needle area, sometimes for hours at a time. To avoid eyestrain and headaches, it’s worth investing in proper lighting for your machine quilting area. It’s also much more pleasant and less stressful to quilt in a well-lit room.
Two Kinds of Quilting Room Lighting: Ambient and Task Lighting
Your quilting room needs two different types of lighting:
- Ambient lighting. Also called general lighting, ambient lighting brightens up the whole quilting room and makes it a pleasant space to be in, instead of a dark and lonely cave. Ceiling fixtures or track lighting fixtures can both create ambient lighting in a sewing room. (See two examples at the bottom of the page. Click on any photo to enlarge it.) Track lights can be aimed at specific locations, such as your cutting table or sewing machine. But ambient lighting alone isn’t sufficient for machine quilting, because the light source is usually located at a distance from your work area. This can cause shadows to fall on your fabric.
- Direct task lighting. Task lighting is directed right at the area where you are working, usually from a much shorter distance than ambient lighting. For machine quilting, task lighting should be aimed at your sewing machine’s needle area. This is especially important when your quilting thread and the fabric you’re sewing on are similar colors.
Task Lighting Options for Machine Quilters
The photo gallery at the bottom of the page shows several different types of lights that are popular with machine quilters:
- Light mounted on the sewing machine. The Bendable Bright Light is a small LED lamp that is sticky-taped onto the head of your sewing machine. Its flexible neck allows you to aim the light directly at the needle area. It has clips to keep the power cord out of the way of your quilt while you sew. It would be hard for even the most dedicated quilter to wear out the bulb, which is rated to last an astonishing 100,000 hours. The Bendable Bright light is available at many local sewing and craft stores and also at online retailers such as Amazon.com or Nancy’s Notions.
- Light mounted on your sewing table. If you don’t like the idea of gluing a light directly to your sewing machine, you can opt for one that clamps to the edge of your sewing table instead. The Überlight 8000C LED Task Light from the Reliable Corporation has a flexible neck that bends to direct the light wherever you need it, and LED bulbs rated to last 60,000 hours.
- Table or floor lamps. Not everyone likes the light from LEDs, which tends toward the blue end of the spectrum. Table or floor lamps from Ott-Lite use special full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs that promise a more accurate view of your fabric and thread colors. These lamps have swing arms that put the bulb right over your work area. Some models even have magnifying lenses that can be positioned to give you a larger-than-life view of your stitches. Many other manufacturers also make floor lamps designed for sewing or quilting. You can see one at the bottom of the page.
- Your sewing machine's own light bulb. Yet another way to brighten the stitching area is to replace your sewing machine’s own internal light bulb with a brighter LED. I did this with my machine and found that the change made the stitch area much brighter. Installing the new light cost about $40 U.S., but the light should last for the life of the sewing machine. Check with your local sewing machine repair shop to see if this is possible for your machine.
Whichever type of lighting you choose, brightening up the quilting area will make machine quilting more enjoyable and certainly won’t hurt the quality of your quilting.
Christine Mann - Christine Mann writes about quilting, home decor sewing, and creativity in daily life.
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