How to Free Motion Quilt Collage Style Quilting - Sit Down Quilting Sunday #5 with Leah Day

hello my quilting friends we a day here with the new sit-down sunday video today I'm quilting a bit more my pair table runner and filling in the background with four different designs and quilting with collage style quilting so let's jump on the quilt and I'll talk you through how this works so I am quilting four different designs in this quilt and the first one I want to show you is called brain coral this is one of my favorite designs so you start with basically a stippling like shape just a random Wiggly freeform shape and the more Wiggly and branchy it is the better it will end up looking because we're aiming for a look kind of like coral that you see in a coral reef now I'm going to travel stitch over and echo or round it and this is how you expand the design make it bigger and really start to punch up that texture it's the echoes that really do all the work now I'm going to connect with that Travel stitch a bit against another one Travel stitch back up and then I'm going to swing around for another echo and you can keep echoing around as many times as you want now I am getting quite close to the edge over here so I'm going to be careful as I travel stitch down might just do a few echoes in this area because I know that I'm probably going to trim this table runner probably with that fold that crease line there in the edge of the table runner this was one of those table runners I got from Ikea and gonna just pick out the hem but it still has a little bit of that Bowl left in it so I can use that as a guide and not quote beyond it that'll be kind of helpful to move on with the brain coral design you just stitch another wiggly wobbly shape and travel stitch and echo it and I think where I'm at in the quilt right now I think I want to change designs I'm going to change to a design called route pockets and this starts with a big teardrop shape a big relief shape actually I come to a point and then stitch all the way back now I'm going to fill this with a design called tree roots so I'm going to stitch down and just branch off randomly there's a lot of travel stitching involved with this design so I branch out from that stem and wiggle down to form it like a tree root kind of looking shape and then I just keep branching back the key with this is travel stitching so you've got to form that weekly line then travel stitch back then branch out always travel stitching along that line and you really want to build up thread here Travel stitching back and forth loops I need to be careful not to travel such too many times or my thread might start to skip I noticed one little skip right there this is one of those things as I'm quilting also paying really close attention to my machine and I'm noticing it's right through here when I see a thread skip I can actually see the thread kind of bow out slightly in that area and it's fast but if you're really paying attention you can catch it catch all those little nuances of your machine and that will really help you start focusing in on things that are going on with it just that might pull you in like okay oh okay the machine just skipped I need to make sure not to make that exact same move again or I just need to get out of that area and move on with the design you can see I just wiggle around and as randomly as possible form these tree branching kind of shapes is tree root shapes I love this design it does tend to get a little intense you know the more you stitch it you know obviously the more you can fill it in and you don't have to go this dense you know you could just stitch a very simple little tree branch or rip root into the area and leave it at that I'm wanting this to be really filled and pretty intense that's just what I'm in the mood for today so that's why I'm spending a little extra time here really filling it in so that's as full as I think it needs to be it's actually pretty pretty intense back here you can see it around the foot so now the next step of the design is to travel stitch and echo around it this is a pivoting design it's a little different from brain coral the design we learn first and that you pivot and quilt around it and you really want to build up tête texture build up thread right at that starting point so I'm gonna stitch back and forth a few times around that and then I'm going to swing around you can see the difference here is that I really emphasize that starting point swirl around again and I think I may go around one more time just like that looks good the cool thing about collage style quilting is you really just kind of get to do whatever you want to whatever you feel like in any particular time and I felt like forming another root pocket shape right here because these shapes stand out so much on the quilt I really think it's a good idea to quilt them at least two of them so I'm folding always a pair a pair on a pair alright that was a bad pun I'm holding a pair of root pocket shapes on this pair table runner I think it's going to look the best that way to have two leaves branching out every time I stitch them you could always do more but you see how time-consuming this is this is a lot slower because I'm having to go in and do all this detailed stitching and travel stitching within each leaf shape and I really want them all to be consistently filled the same amount this is just me being kind of a little nitpicky honestly but you know it doesn't have to be this full but that's the look I'm going for it whoops whoops whoops I hope you saw that back up the video so you can see there was just a little bit of skip right there so I'm going to rotate this ever so slightly on the table so that way I'm at a different position kind of a different location and I think that's going to help so I shifted the quilt around and repositioned it a bit because I saw the thread was doing something weird and that was a signal to me that I needed to change the orientation of the quilt and also maybe lighten up a little bit on my travel stitching so you just have to tune in and really be built vigilant and paying attention to every little thing that's happening on your machine and that's going to help you prevent thread breaks you know how do I let it continue to skip I probably would have broken thread right there so now I'm going to do my echo quilting and I'm just pivoting off that starting point I like to do a little bit of travel stitching there to build it up nicely and then I head it around and the whole thing is because we are going for that travel stitching I can always use that space to kind of get through the design and get to another area cool so now I'm moving down I want to move downward towards this new pair it's lower in the quilt and I want to quilt a nice big design it's going to take up a lot of space and a good choice for that is my third design I'm using it as well and that is fossil snail so this design starts it's kind of a foundational base you're going to start with a big open spiral so I'm leaving about a half of an inch of space as I spiral inside you can see you're going to need a little bit of space on your quilt just to plan this out and then now I reach the center and I'm just bouncing back and forth with these bouncy echos to get out this is what's going to create the fossil snail look I love this design it's very intense you can see I'm slowing down as I bounce I hit that line and I speed up and then I hit the opposite line so I'm just bouncing between those two lines of Boateng back and forth and I have this very subtle variegated thread this is yli variations very gary thread it's my favorite variegated because it has these really subtle thread color changes they're not real dramatic but every once in a while it'll go to that light green and I just think that looks so pretty that really looks nice so I'm just bouncing between the lines and as I'm spiraling out I'm paying attention of course to any thread issues you know there might be a particular direction that my machine doesn't like to Colton and I have to watch out for that I was thinking that because it was a long arm and it didn't have feed dogs that I wouldn't have to worry about what direction to stitch in but you know thread is thread in a machine is a machine and I found that it can still be sensitive to the direction that you're stitching in and if you stitch in the wrong direction for too long it's going to have an issue so you just have to be vigilant and watch out for that on your machine so far this design is really working well and see I've got good speed control that's just I'm just I'm very lightly pressing down on the foot pedal and I'm trying to balance that with the speed of my hands if I sped up I definitely can speed up here my stitches are going to get smaller because my hands yeah I'm gonna have to slow down my hands just can't keep up with it it's a very small movement and I don't want to get sloppy now that I'm coming out of that process snail shape that's circular spiral shape I'm just start expanding these bouncy echoes so that I'm making them bigger and I want them to to branch out just a little bit here I think that really makes it look nice I'm just going to bounce back and forth and go all the way to that tab so this is the cool thing about this design it stacks together in a really unusual way and you really get a make up just kind of make it up on the fly as far as where it goes next and how you fill it next so I could come down and swing in a spiral this way I could arch the spiral around and swirl at the opposite direction I could also kind of create a second channel and just kind of echo around this first spiral shape it really pays to just look at the quilt and kind of trace your finger along it and figure out what you want to do I think I want to bring a spiral and that curls the opposite direction so here's what I'm going to do bring down my line and swirl my spiral shape in just like this that looks good and then to start my echoes I just start with just out kind of like at just a simple arch shape and then I just start bouncing back and forth around that this was just a little bit messy to get started sometimes it is hard to talk and fold at the same time but you know what throw more thread at it I'm not going to rip it out I'm just going to throw more thread at it and build up that texture and you will not be able to tell that that was a little bit messy it's just going to look a little bit more green because I travel stitched over it a few more times and the other thing to keep in mind too is proccess now because you're bouncing against it you're also building up thread there too so it's going to tend to be a darker design a bold design on the surface of your quilt especially if you're quilting it with contrasting thread like I am as I bounce back and forth that's also going to build up the texture in that area and kind of hide those initial stitching mistakes it's easy to stitch off your line it's just one of those things and I'm still learning how to control my speed and movement on this machine it's not always easy there's a lot more speed here and I'm just starting to get the hang of that so you can probably hear I'm pressing down a little bit more just a little bit more as I quilt that art shape and then I slow down I back off ever so slightly as I hit that line so that way I don't overshoot it and I'm not stitching too many times in place so now I'm going to keep filling back all the way to that starting point I like to fill in all those little nooks and crannies and the nice thing is you don't ever have to question what to fill it in with just going to fill it in with these bouncy echoes and in little spaces you can fill in just with back and forth travel stitching and I'll fill it in with thread so that looks nice I really think that's funky it stands out nicely on the quilt but there's one last design that I'm using in this background and that is concentric circles and this is a great design for spaces like this that are real tight and tiny and kind of hard to fill with any other design so I'm going to start with just a circle shape and I'm just going to quit a few spot just regular basic spirals because this is so small you kind of want to lose the design if I bothered your quilt the entire design in this area I've called a few spirals here and then I'll show you how to do regular concentric circles next and this looks like this one's going to be big enough so I quilt a circle shape now I'm going to spiral inside and quilt another circle inside and the Travel stitch around that circle one time and then spiral my way back out so by doing it that way you end up with two circles in the space here's one that's just a little bit bigger spiral inside quilt a circle in the middle Travel stitch around that circle and I'm kind of looking for the space where I can spiral back out right through the middle the gap left when I first spiraled inside here I'll quotes a really big one for you you can expand this you can make these huge they're not going to be very big on this quilt but you could make them much bigger if you wanted to so now I'm quilting inside with a spiral once I get to the middle I fell in with a circle and travel stitch around it now Travel stitch around until I reach a point where I can branch off and spiral back out again so any kind of circular design I mean you could do regular pebble you could do pebble in with basic spirals in it any kind of circular stacking pebble InDesign is going to fill in this background space really nicely any little gap any weird areas it's going to fill it in perfectly so that you don't have to worry about it you can see how I used concentric circles over here on this side to fill in the area around the leaves so that's it for this video I really hope that you enjoyed learning the style of quilting it's really funky in freeform you can kind of do whatever you want with it it really just comes down to your choice of designs and how often you want to be changing designs I would say that this is very entertaining you know like if I picked one design and quilted it through the entire background I would be pretty bored about halfway through the quilt because I get a play with four different designs and constantly changing them it's really entertaining and it kind of always keeps it flowing and you know if there's a particular design that I really like and I'm enjoying I can quote a little bit more of it and if there's a design that I'm like I really don't want to do much more of that then quote one or two repetitions of it and be done with it it is working really really well on this long arm and I'm really excited about it I was breaking thread a little bit more at the beginning when I first started the table runner but I started noticing you know just some speed movement stuff just watching the speed watching the direction and the angle I was quilting in and that definitely helped you know sometimes it can be the height of your foot on the surface of the quilt it can be the thread it can be a lot of different things that cause threads to skip and then break so next week why don't I share a video about how to adjust the height of your foot to get it just right so it stops it from skipping so I think I'll share that next week so be looking forward to that video coming up soon if you have any questions about quilting on your table mounted or set down lawn garden please post in the comments below I may just make a video just for you if you enjoyed this video please share it with your friends and subscribe to my channel on youtube so you don't miss out on the next video coming out soon until next time let's go quilt

Channel: Leah Day

Views: 81,296

Rating: 4.8971257 out of 5

Keywords: sit down quilting, machine quilting, longarm quilting machines, free motion quilting, table mounted longarm, sit down longarm, sit-down longarm, longer quilting machines, quilting a larger quilt on a sit down, longarm machine, sit down machine, sit-down quilting machine, sit down long arm quilting machine, sit down long arm quilting, sit down quilting machine, Leah Day, collage quilting, collage free motion quilting, graffiti quilting, graffiti quilting tutorial

Id: LmQpU5CApQM

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2017