Learn how to choose quilting designs for your quilt on Fresh Quilting with Christina Cameli (101-1)

[Music] to do hi I'm Kristina Keneally I'm a free motion quilting author and teacher and I'm here to talk to you today about choosing quilting designs for your quilt when I go over this with students in my class the thing I like to ask first is what's the favorite thing about your quilt that's the best thing about this quilt for you and sometimes that's a fabric sometimes it's a color a particular shape or just an area of the quilt and if you have something like that in the quilt you're looking to to finish then start there we think of ways that we can emphasize the weight the things that you like best about your quilt one of the best ways that you can emphasize something is by leaving it unquoted so here I have a little example in this block I just quilted everything equally it's all pressed down the same way but in the second block I've chosen this fuchsia color to leave unquoted and hopefully you can see this in person the future really lifts off of the list off of the fabric and grabs your attention first it takes my eye another couple of seconds to even notice that there's this blue triangle right here so leaving something unquoted is a way to get the viewers attention first now you may have areas of your quilt that are too big to leave completely unquoted and that's fine too that's the situation that I had with this quilt here I had these long ribbons of color that I wanted to emphasize and I wanted the white to sort of recede into the background so there I just decided to use a less dense quilting pattern on the stuff that I wanted to emphasize so it's really open and I wasn't afraid to leave some bigger areas here so that poofed up a little bit and it becomes the foreground of the quilt and then with the white I quilted it pretty densely and that swishes down and becomes the background there's other ways to increase focus on a particular area of your quilt any time you stitch several times around a shape echoing it you give a visual reverberation to the area kind of underlines that part whatever you've echoed and it pulls the viewers eye in there and so here I've done both leaving something unclothed and echoing around it another way to pull the viewers eye somewhere is to have a bunch of lines that radiate out from a Centerpoint so here and pulling a lot of focus on that star because all of these lines on the outside are leading in right to the star so after we thought about areas we want to emphasize then you can turn your attention to what motifs might you use and I always value the quilters instinct on this one if there's something that's coming to your mind let's start there and start playing with it for me one of the things that comes to my mind first is pebbles but pebbles take a long time if you're going to cover a whole quilt in pebbles they take a long time to quilt and for me I get a little bored of just doing pebbles so I like to think of ways that I can use that motif a little differently so here's one way that I've come up with I've got a lot of the fun of pebbles of just having them in these lines but they're also interspersed with these wavy lines and to give it a little bit of to give it a little bit of variety and to make the quilting go a little bit faster you know if you need help coming up with motifs one thing you might do is look to your fabrics if you're using print fabrics here I've got a fabric and the quilting design that came out of it and you might have you might have inspiration like this all throughout your quilt and if you do this is a great way to find motifs that are already working with the quilt itself and just lift them up into the quilting design so here is a piece of patchwork and I've got some quilting designs that that it inspired this fabric leads me to this leafy vine these little circles on the on the strings give me this kind of a pattern I'm getting this great orange peel pattern off of this fabric right here and then these little orange beads made me think of this design and of all of them that I came up with from this piece of patchwork I think this one is my favorite and I'll tell you why if you're a new quilter it may be a little challenging for you to think of how you move around the quilt and make sure to cover all the space without getting stuck in a corner or leaving something uncoated so what I like about this design is it starts at one end of the piece and it goes all the way to the other so you kind of know which direction you're going you start at one end and you just keep quilting in that direction you don't have a lot of decisions to make so I want to show you how I'm going to stitch this so that you could try it at home if you want I'm going to start at the bottom of my piece and my reason for that is right now there's nothing - there's nothing to match this pattern I'm going to try and match one side to the other roughly and I want to I want to be stitching my first half out into the open space it can be a little hard to see behind the free motion foot so anytime you know that there's blank space behind you that's a great way to start out and then I'm going to come back down the other side and it'll be easier for me to see the points that I'm trying to match then okay so let's try this design I've got my needle lined back up with where I pulled the bobbin thread up and I'm going to take a couple of locking stitches there although if I were starting at the edge of the quilt I wouldn't need to do that and I've given myself here a little guiding line just written lightly in white pencil we'll see if I can follow that it's behind the it's behind the free motion foot so it may make it a little challenging I'm just going to go with these little half circle arts my stitching has kind of gotten out of this little shape that I have in my hands what I call the u-shape so I'm going to stop there and reposition my hands the needle was down in the fabric so it doesn't shift when I do that and start again and I'm making sure that some of them are smaller some of them are bigger and I'll reposition my hands again and now here I'm at the top I'm going to come back down the other side and I'm not wearing too much about hitting the line exactly I'm giving a little space between one edge and the other so I've got some wiggle room there reposition again and there you go when you start the next line you could dry yourself a new guiding line or you could just start to work with the spacing that you have all right so let me show you a few more things another thing to keep in mind when you're choosing your clothing designs is do you want your quilting designs to go over the seams of your patchwork or do you want to keep the designs within the seams of your patchwork and here's how I like to think of that if my patchwork says really everything I want to say in that quilt then I generally will keep the quilting within the theme seam lines of the patchwork so that I'm just emphasizing what the patchwork is already saying so that's kind of the approach that I took with the quilt on the wall over here for me that quilt is about the optical illusion of the overlapping squares and I didn't want any overlapping quilting over those seam lines to muddy that but sometimes the situation calls for an overall design and that's fine too this quilt right here I ended up once I was done piecing the top I ended up feeling a little underwhelmed with the range of fabrics the color values in it and and I knew that I wanted a quilting to add to the quilt so that the quilt had a little bit more to say and so in that case I chose this all-over design that didn't as much emphasized the piecing as it did sort of make big spaces open spaces for these quilting designs to come through this is this is another edge to edge design and a really good one for new quilters to try so once you thought about all these questions about what might work for your quilt I would advise that you don't go directly to quilting but you take a little time with pen and paper to make sure that you're that you like the decisions that you're making and that you feel ready to take the take the designs through your quilt so how I do that is I take a photo of my quilt and I'll try and just get a small piece of the quote so I can see at the level of the quilting design how things are going to work and usually I'll increase the brightness on the color if you have a program that can do that or decrease the opacity which would make the the image more transparent so it's easier to even on the darker colors and printed out a few times so that you can give yourself some ideas on this quilt I decided that what I'd really like to do would be to emphasize these big colors so I gave it I had quilted down the middle I thought about quilting down the middle and quilting down the background there if I thought about different ways to do it in the different in the different wheels so take these ideas make them your own trust your own instincts this has been picking folding design [Music]

Channel: ksproductionstv

Views: 117,113

Rating: 4.924078 out of 5

Keywords: Echo quilting, Christina Cameli, The Modern Quilt Guild, contrast, curved lines, fabric motifs, Brother International Corporation, PQ1500SLPRW sewing machine

Id: RmTNanx0PHk

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2017