Bats and Stars for Spooky Season: Offsetting Rows on a Pink Halloween Quilt
Happy Feature Friday, quilting friends! Spooky season is here, and there's a brand-new Halloween quilt on the frame in the sewing studio. In Feature Friday 2026 Episode 42, Aubrey sets up an edge-to-edge design called Bats & Stars and uses nearly every Edit feature on the Butler Robotics system to get it looking just the way she pictured it, including a staggered, offset second row.
Meet the Halloween Cutie
This little quilt is a bit non-traditional for Halloween, because there's pink in it. The top is built from a Moda charm pack covered in cats, stars, pumpkins, and little potion bottles, which Aubrey calls just the sweetest Halloween fabric. The pink border frames everything and gives the whole quilt a soft, playful look instead of the usual orange and black.
The plan is to have it quilted and bound in the next couple of weeks, so it can live on the living room couch for the holiday.
Setting the Layout Box
The safe area was already set using the backing fabric, so the first job is adding a layout box that represents the quilt top:
Open Layout. From Layout on the left side of the display, tap the plus sign on the right to add a new layout box.
Set the first point. Aubrey always starts at the top left corner, hovering the needle just slightly above and to the left of it. That way, if the sides get a little wibbly wobbly on the way down, the design still catches most of the fabric.
Set the next point. Tap the plus sign, move across to the right side of the quilt, and pick a point about a quarter inch outside the edge.
Confirm. Tap the check mark, and there's a nice large pattern box ready for a design.
Choosing the Design: Bats & Stars
From the Patterns menu, Aubrey typed "bat" into the search bar to find the design she'd already loaded: Bats & Stars by Lovely Threads, purchased from the Quilt Companion website.
The choice was easy once you look closely at the fabric. Some of the charm squares have bats on them and some have stars, so a quilting design with both ties the quilting right back into the prints. Highlight the pattern in orange, tap the check mark, and one repeat of the design drops into the layout box.
The Edit Features, One After Another
Loading a pattern jumps you straight into Edit, and this is where most of the episode happens. Aubrey moves back and forth between several features to build the look she has in her head.
1. Repeat horizontally
In Repeat, tap the horizontal plus sign until there are three repeats of the bat-and-star motif. One of them hangs outside the pattern box at this point, and that's fine for now.
2. Lock the proportion and auto scale
Jump to Scale and turn on the proportion lock before changing anything, so the bats and stars keep their shape. Here's how to tell it's on:
Off: the lock is white and open.
On: the lock turns orange and closes.
With the lock on, tap Auto Scale, and all three repeats shrink to fit inside the pattern box.
3. Move it to the top
Auto Scale dropped the design down to the bottom of the box. In Move, the button at the very top right sends the pattern to the top of the pattern box, and the bats and stars jump up to the tippy top. (It's the same quick-position button used on the mermaid quilt's seashells.)
4. Add a second row
Back in Repeat, tap the vertical plus sign to add a second row of bats and stars underneath the first.
5. Add an extra horizontal repeat
This step sets up the offset. Because the second row is about to slide sideways, it needs a little extra design to fill the space it leaves behind. Adding one more horizontal repeat doesn't change the size of what's already there, which is exactly the point.
6. Offset the second row
Here's the new trick for this episode. The Offset button shifts the second row sideways so the motifs sit every other, instead of stacked straight on top of each other:
Minus offset moves the second row to the left.
Plus offset moves it to the right.
Since the extra repeat is hanging off the right side, Aubrey uses the minus offset. Holding a finger on the button moves the row slowly, increment by increment, across the screen. Her goal was to line up the tip of a bat's tail with the top of a star in the row below. Zoom in close to check, and tap once more if it needs just a hair more.
She admits she gets a little fiddly with this part, but those small adjustments are what make the rows interlock so nicely.
7. Tighten the spacing between rows
The two rows looked a touch too far apart, so it's on to Spacing. Each tap of the minus sign on the vertical spacing pulls the rows a little closer together. A few taps did it. (Remember tightening the raindrops to -0.90 on April Showers? Same idea.)
8. Crop the overhang
Now there's a bat and a couple of stars hanging off the right side of the top row, plus some stars sticking out on the second row. With not much extra backing and batting to stitch onto, those need to go.
Open Cropping and use the button that crops away anything outside the orange layout box. The extra bat disappears along with the other stray bits, leaving exactly the design Aubrey wants to stitch.
This is the opposite of the crop used on the mermaid block, where the goal was to cut out the inside of a box. Same feature, different button, completely different result.
The full recipe
To recap, getting this layout just right took: repeat, scale, move, repeat again, offset, spacing, and crop. That's a lot of steps, but each one is quick, and together they turn a single motif into a staggered, custom-looking edge-to-edge design.
Stitching It Out
With the layout set, go to Home, highlight the needle so the machine will stitch, and tap the green go button. Double-check that the needle is up so it doesn't tear the quilt top, then tap the check mark.
The machine travels to the top left corner, where the first little bat wing begins. From there it's the familiar routine:
Single stitch. Take a single stitch and tap the check mark.
Pull up the bobbin thread. Move the machine out of the way and pull the bobbin thread up so you have both tails. Confirm.
Recenter and lock. The system recenters on the starting point. Aubrey cycles the needle about three times to lock the stitches.
Stitch. Turn stitching on, tap the check mark, and off it goes.
When the Thread Doesn't Work Out
Aubrey started with black thread, hoping it would show off the design on the pink border and still go with the Halloween prints in the center. One bat and three stars later, she decided she hated it. The black was pulling attention away from the pretty fabric instead of complementing it.
So out came the seam ripper. She switched to a pale pink thread that blends in, and she's much happier with how it looks. The little holes left behind by the black stitching will get a hit of steam once the quilt is finished to help close them up.
It's an honest reminder that not every idea works out on the frame. As Aubrey puts it, there's usually a fix, even if it means spending some time with your seam ripper.
Two Rows Down
By the end of the episode, the first two rows of bats and stars are finished, and the offset rows look great, with each bat tucked neatly beside a star. There's more quilting to come before this one makes it to the couch for Halloween.
The Takeaway
The Offset feature is a simple way to turn a basic grid of repeats into a staggered, all-over design, as long as you add an extra horizontal repeat first to fill the space the shifted row leaves behind. Combine it with the proportion lock, Move, Spacing, and the crop-outside-the-box button, and you can shape a purchased design to fit your quilt exactly. And if a thread color isn't working, it's worth stopping early to change it rather than finishing a quilt you won't love.
Want to see the full process in action? Check out the complete video here: Feature Friday 2026 Episode 42: Setting Up Halloween Quilt.
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