Free Motion Quilt Design: Left or Right (Zig Zag Lines)

[Music] hey guys welcome this is jen frost with faith in fabric and welcome back to our free motion fridays this has been a really fun series that we're doing every friday introducing you to not only a new free motion pattern but to a scripture verse that ties into it i'll pop a link up here to all of our free motion fridays in case you've missed any today we're going to be talking about a technique that i'm calling left or right now this is a really cool technique and i'm going to show you a quilt that i used it and why i like to use this on certain quilts so this is my little fisherman quilt um literally my little fisherman this was uh inspired by when we took a big camping trip a few years ago my son was sitting on the dock in just this lazy old straw hat and he was fishing and i just wanted to capture that moment so here he is on his little fishing dock catching absolutely nothing with his pole but this is a really fun pattern to make now when i came to quilting the background i was really torn on how i wanted to quilt this and one thing that was bothering me about this quilt was that there were obviously a lot of sharp angles in the quilt itself but there were a lot of sharp angles in the background i'm going to flip sides here so i can bring this a little closer and you can see a little bit more what i mean so obviously when you paper piece like this you're going to end up with lots of little pieces that are going to make their way into the background now if you have a very flat background so you're using a solid color that would stand out even more you would see where those um those marks are from those seam lines you know because when you when you sew and then you fold and you sew and you fold you're gonna end up with a lot of jagged seam lines so i wanted to help them blend into the background so what i did is you'll see if i turn the sideways the light catches it i did a technique here that i'm calling left or right and you're basically making more jagged angle lines all the way through your quilt and what that does is it's going to really help blend in those jagged seam lines that you have and it's going to make those seam lines now when you see a seam line blend right into the quilt itself you're not even going to see it as much so obviously this is a seam line right here the fabric i had was multi-toned so you know this is a lighter color piece against a darker color piece but the seam itself almost looks like it's just a stitch line that i put in and you'll see that there's other seams that are in here that you don't even really see here's one this one blends in a lot more it's almost hard to tell that seam just from a actual stitch line so this is a really great technique to use for filling backgrounds of quilts like these i'll actually put a link to this pattern down below if you want to check it out more obviously this one was done in a very americana feel and it currently hangs over my little man's bed when i'm not using it for demos but since this is free motion friday let's take a look at where we can find this in scripture isaiah 30 21 says your ears will hear a word behind you this is the way walk in it whenever you turn to the right or to the left now isaiah is speaking to the people of israel who have been pretty obstinate up until now now god has been parenting them as well and i like going to use that word here you know he's been kind of reprimanding them because they're not doing what they're supposed to and it's much in the same way that we parent our own children where you know you know you didn't you shouldn't have done that that was the wrong choice to make and god is parenting them and they're just kind of becoming a little defiant and so isaiah is here talking to them and what i really like about this scripture verse is he's reminding them whenever they make a decision whenever they're going somewhere whenever they're doing anything whenever they're just going about their daily life they should stop for a minute and listen for that voice telling them what to do whether they're going this way or they're going this way they need to stop and listen and i like this let's look at it one more time your ears will hear a word behind you so let me ask you if you need to hear a word that's behind you what are you going to be doing are you going to be busy talking or busy planning or do you need to stop for a minute and listen i know for me i need to stop and listen i need to stop what i'm doing and i need to just if someone's trying to talk for me from behind and i think that's what isaiah is trying to tell here that israel you need to you need to stop you need to calm down and you need to listen in the quietness of your heart and the quietness of your soul to be able to hear god talking to you before you go about making those decisions before you go about going to the left or going to the right and this is really important for us even today because you think about how busy we all are and how much we've got going on and you know there's constantly even our own voice in our head telling us oh we've got to do this we got to run to the store we've got to get our bills paid we've got to get over here to pick up our swim lessons so so much going on but it's in that quietness and that stillness that we can actually take that time to hear that voice behind us kind of guiding us and nudging us in whichever directions we may be going so let's take a look at all those different directions we're going today with some tips on how to make them first you want to make your points sharp when changing directions otherwise you're going to end up with a lot of curves second unlike other designs we've practiced before you do want to overlap your lines make the overlap of lines varying shapes and sizes and let me show you what i mean by that so down here for example you can see when i was stitching i came over and then i actually re-overlapped on my line there so that's when we're talking about overlapping your lines you are going to be crossing them normally that's something we don't do so let's head over to the machine and we'll sew together so let's do a quick supply check i've got my green sulky thread on here i've got my me and my sister fabric with some very very thin cotton batting and white fabric on the back so we can take a look i've got my slow steady roller work glider i'll put a link to this below i would never free motion without this you guys it makes it so easy to slide things around i don't want to slide this around too much because i've got my bottom thread pulled up i don't want to lose that but let's go ahead and get started so this is actually a super easy design we're going to do today it's basically just meandering with straight lines that are going to overlap so you're just going to be making some left to the right designs as you go through you the big thing you want to think about is how much space you want do you want to have a lot of space between your designs like i did in that quilt i showed you earlier or just a little bit of space um you know and we'll probably go a little bit tighter here just because this is a smaller um a smaller size fabric that we're working with so let's get started so i'm just going to come through and you'll see i'm going to make my straight line and stop so the nice thing about this is unlike other designs because this is all straight lines you have that ability to just stop whenever you hit a corner if you need to get up or take a break that's no problem at all unlike a curve which is a lot harder if you stop in the middle of a curve it's very hard to pick the rest of that curve back up at that same angle you were working at so you see i've come down a little bit now i'm just going to reverse it i'll come up this way and then i'm going to come over so you'll see i've actually crossed over my line right here and we'll turn it a little bit so you can see it so i've crossed and i've come down and you're just going to be making these uh to the left and to the right all the way through your design so we'll do maybe one more together and then i'm going to speed this up because this is this is pretty straightforward come over in see just basically making all different kinds of shapes again the key here is just to make sure that you don't accidentally swing a curve you will see curves in this and they will stand out you really want this just to be nothing but different shaped straight line angles now you can always do this with a walking foot obviously if that's more comfortable for you you can put your walking foot on and then just continue to turn your fabric as you sew on your fabric again because i'm doing this as exclusively free motion i've got my hopper foot on here because i really want to practice making those sharp straight lines with the free motion foot on so i'm going to speed this up a little bit and we'll meet up at the end [Music] that was a pretty easy one today let's see how it turned out so here's the front of my fabric and you can see it has all those really nice um filler lines and again what i like about this is not only does it is it a great background filler but especially when you're paper piecing which you guys know i love to do and it it hides a lot of those seams because those straight lines of those seams just blend seamlessly with with the design you're making so let's take a look at the back um you can see overall it looks really good so again we were practicing making very straight lines with a free motion foot that honestly in and of itself is a skill so if you didn't feel comfortable going in all different directions you know this is definitely um something you want to practice now mine are all pretty straight i know when i was making it there was oh there it is there's one little spot where i curved a little bit instead of making that perfectly straight i did kind of um i did kind of loop a little bit but you know it's not it's it's not horrific you're not going to notice it much you'll see i also played around with overlaps so i made some little i mean most of my overlaps are triangles but you'll see here's some bigger ones um that's kind of a funky little shape this one looks almost like a zigzaggy christmas tree here's a little bit more that zigzag over here we've got some small triangles bigger triangles and again i just like this because you're not going for a specific exact pattern this makes a really good filler because there's nothing you're going to do that's wrong the only tip i'll say is in terms of things you could do wrong besides curves you want to make sure that you are coming to the edge so you'll see one thing i did is i did make sure that i didn't have too much empty space coming along the edges because what could happen is like let's go over here say i didn't pull these guys in here like if i just kind of came here and i was like well that's good i'm going to stop right there this whole section of my um my fabrics would be unattached so unless you were planning you know obviously we're we're gonna be making a tutorial on how to attach all of our squares together but uh if you weren't you would end up with just you know spots where you your quilt sandwich isn't properly connected so just keep an eye out on that but overall a nice easy design today for a very busy september i'm assuming some of you guys are back to school either for yourselves or with your families so i hope school's going well for you that you're not too too busy with all these new schedules and that you are going slowly enough and quietly enough in all your directions that you have time to listen for that voice behind you we'll see you in the next episode of free motion friday until then have a wonderful week take care [Music] you

Channel: Faith and Fabric

Views: 55

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: fmq, how to fmq, how to free motion quilt lines, how to free motion quilt zig zags

Id: HE-kPH4mS-4

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021