Help! How Do I Quilt It? 3 Tips for Choosing Quilting Designs

do you or somebody you know suffer from quilters amnesia this is a mysterious condition that is caused by the finishing of a quilt top perhaps these symptoms sound familiar you've finished piecing your top only to forget every quilting design you've ever learned while mysterious it's very common in fact it afflicts most machine quilters okay obviously I'm just joking but we've all been there right you finish the quilt top you can't remember any of your quilting designs in fact you have no clue how you're gonna quilt it it's all too familiar and in this tutorial I'll give you some things to think about when you're trying to pick out designs for your quilts hi i'm angela walters from quilting is my therapy and this is the last video in our free motion challenge quilting along well at least this one we will be having another one and now we have to fill in the backgrounds and the border to see what our quilts gonna look like if you just happen to stumble along this video because you're in the rabbit hole that is youtube don't worry even if you didn't make this exact quilt the things that we're going to talk about in this video will help you decide on how to quilt your quilt the first thing you need to do is look over your quilt and decide how much you love the blocks and the quilt i know it sounds a little weird but we're gonna use the quilting to highlight or hide particular blocks in your quilt depending on how you feel about them first up a let's pretend you finish your quilt top you're looking it over and you're pretty proud of yourself those blocks look fantastic what you can do is quote them all the same the first quilting example i'm going to use with our quilting a long quilt uses dot-to-dot quilting to frame the blocks but i'm quilting them all the same way that way i had this nice overall texture all the blocks shine and it's fast and easy with no marking basically what i'm doing is using the corners of the block as my guide quilting a line out to the edge traveling and then coming back that's really gonna help give this block that kind of twisted slanted whirling kind of look now I am incorporating a little bit of traveling in this technique I use traveling to work my way around a quilt you could of course leave that out if you'd like but it's going to take a lot of starts and stops to finish a quilt so kind of way that inside how you like it and since I'm using those geometric straight lines around the block I thought it would be nice to do a curvy contrasting design like the wishbone now I'll show you what the rest of that looks like at the end of the video well next let's talk about the second way to go about quilting your quilt highlighting some of the blocks most often this is going to be the case making pull blocks is kind of like having children and making pancakes right you mess up the first few but by time you get to the end they're pretty perfect so when you're looking at your quilt if you think mmm I don't love all the blocks there's a few that I'm pretty proud of what you can do is use the quilting to highlight that and in the second quilting option for the something wrong what we're gonna do is use echoing around our favorite blocks now straight line echoing is kind of a way to add a parenthesis or to kind of gently point you to the area you want people to look at it's almost like saying hey this is a pretty fantastic block you should probably look at it now straight line echoing is my favorite because it acts like that frame it really kind of separates it from the rest of the filler that I'm going to use in the background and it's easy so there's that now if you don't love straight lines don't worry you can do some other echoing options whether it's using a different design around the block or even using wavy lines and once you have all your frames quilted then it's time to fill and around it and it just so happens we've learned some amazing designs during this building along so what you can do is actually combine them to create a fund filler the trick to combining divine is to quote the bigger elements first such as the feather meander or a swirl then to come back and film around with the smaller design like a regular meander or a wishbone the hardest part about combining designs is that you might get gaps miracle team and I think people will notice a gap in the quilting before they notice an error so as long as you're filling it in whether it's with smaller designs or echoing it's going to look fine this is a great way to practice different designs and it just keeps me from getting bored another thing that will help you in your combining designs is to think about keeping the spacing between the lines the same since we're using so many different kinds of designs in different shapes we want to make sure that one design doesn't stand out too much more than the other the spacing between the lines will keep the density the same and allow it all to kind of blend together that is of course unless you want one element to show up more than the other that would look kind of cool too and here you can see they don't have any gaps in my quilting and all the spacing is the same so in my x-blocks I'm combining my designs in the filler I'm loving how it looks but I'm gonna wait and show you if that whole foot looks like at the end so stick around the third quilting a long option is where work may be trying to distract from Auto blocks this is when we're gonna use the quilting to create a fun secondary pattern in the quilt now I'll do this even if I love the quilt blocks because I think it's fun and amusing when I stepped back and I looked at the quilt I could almost imagine the zigzag come out where the blocks were turning away from each other I thought what if we extended those lines and created a grid that we could fill in later so you know that's exactly what I did quilting along the side of the blocks and extending the lines out into the sashing how fun is this my ruler that I designed with creative grants fits perfectly inside these blocks I promise I didn't do that on purpose once I got to the middle of the sashing that was my pivot point where I would turn and quilt the next direction heading towards the next block since the blocks are kind of acting as a guide for my quilting that means I don't have to do any marking so I'm going to keep doing this down one side of the quilt and then I'll repeat on the other side until I have my secondary pattern so I had to give you a quick sneak peek at what this was looking like there are my lines quilted along the side of the blocks now obviously I've got those straight lines but I'm gonna go back and fill in some more and I'm going to show you what it looks like at the very end now when it came to all three options I probably wouldn't do everyone on the same quilt but for this one since I'm using as a teaching tool I'm gonna use the framing option the dot-to-dot quilting around the blocks with the wishbone and even the secondary pattern and even though I'm using a hot pink thread and quilting a lot of different designs on it I am so in love with the way it looks in a few of the blocks I use the first option where we quilted them all the same with the dotted quilting and the wishbones in between it looks so great and even better no marking in a couple of other blocks I use a second option where I quilted that frame around it and combine designs as a filler especially had a lot of fun sneaking in those wishbones in random places but then again I'm pretty easily amused I'm not gonna lie if I had to pick a favorite it would be making the secondary design with the quilting adding the echo lines and the serpentine lines gives it just a nice pop of texture and it just so happens I put together some free downloadable PDFs that will show you exactly how to quilt all three options all you have to do is look in the description box below so what do you think when you're looking at your quilts which option do you think you'll be using more showing them all off highlighting some of them or creating that fun secondary pattern go ahead and finish up your quilting along quilt if you're doing the free motion challenge and if you don't know what I'm talking about be sure to check the description box below all you have to do is scroll down you'll see a little arrow that says more and that will have all the information that we're talking about in this video and since you're already scrolling down there and go ahead and hit subscribe because you don't want to miss my next video where I announce the next free motion challenge quilt that we're working on and it's gonna be really fun I can't wait well I guess all that's left to do now that I'm done is to bind the quilt which is my least favorite part I wonder if there's a binders avoidance clasp somewhere

Channel: Angela Walters

Views: 111,785

Rating: 4.937407 out of 5

Keywords: machine quilting, free-motion challenge quilting along, angela walters, picking out designs, quilting designs, quilting is my therapy, quilting tips, machine quilting free motion, angela walters quilting, quilting tips for meandering, quilting is my therapy videos, quilting is my therapy rulers, machine quilting square blocks, quilting videos, free quilt pattern, quiltign diagrams, how to pick quilting designs, quilting videos youtube

Id: 7QHnkXUswuA

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 16 2018