Tear Drops - Short and Sweet

hi there it's Helen Gordon all the way from Australia and I'm the sweet 16 ambassador for handi quilter and this is the little segment that we like to call short and sweet today I'm going to take you through a process of a design I call tear drops and it's not gonna make you cry it's a little process of designs that once you get the basics you can then vary it with so many different options it's a really fun one to do so let's get started on the sweet 16 foot pedal find that foot pedal can sometimes be a challenge so as the name suggests we're going to start with that teardrop shape and then we're going to repeat that shape and again so you can see here I've quite deliberately have an open space and then some tight tight stitching so you get that contrast of open and busy let's say so once you've done that first shape you now repeat it and each time you are starting with that inside shape and then repeating repeating so I've gone around three times in total the first shape and then two echoes it doesn't really matter how many times but it does help to get that consistency I'll show you one more time [Music] so as your quilting because you've gone around three times you end up on the opposite side if you decide that you really need to come down here on the quilt you don't want to keep working on that side of the quilt you're concerned about moving down here or just travel or echo around the outside of that last shape to get you to where you want to be so it doesn't really matter if you've gone around that shape three times in the overall scheme of things that's just going to fit in with the others if it echos around and you travel to an area that you now want to fill [Music] [Applause] so once you've got that basic style you can start to change that initial shape that we make so this time it was a teardrop what if we change that to something like a love heart [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can see then I just traveled all the way back up to here because I'm a bit concerned about this empty space I'm leaving behind the consistency comes in in that shape is about the same size each time with the little echoes and I really like the way you've got the contrast of empty and full so that's a tittle of heart design maybe we could try triangles [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so you can see with this triangle shape it really needs to be quite a long skinny triangle so I like to think about an ice-cream cone I think I'm just getting hungry again but that way you make a triangle shape that you can stitch around and echo quite easily as you can see with some of these they tend to be all sort of heading in one direction you can always echo and move to another area to have those going in all different directions the beauty of this design is that it doesn't have to start in a corner or on an edge or a ditch of a quilt it can be absolutely started in the middle of an area middle of a block and it will just continue to grow one shape on to the next because you can always travel somewhere to be able to make it grow in a different direction [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so you can see there are has traveled all the way from up the top down here to an open space where I need to do more designs now I don't suggest that you would actually put all these different designs together I'm sort of giving you different examples here but you can see how the tear drops or the love heart design is quite a feminine flowing pattern the triangles are perhaps more of a masculine or geometric or abstract design so there's all different ways of using this pattern but once you have that basic concept that the variations are quite endless I'm going to show you one now that's more of a leaf design I'm going to start with the center vein of the leaf and then you'll see how we go [Music] [Applause] so that center vein really sets me on a path on a new direction and I'm going to find that leaf shape around it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that's going to look lovely on a quilt with all autumn leaves and fall colors something like that again it's that open space contrasting with the clothes stitching that starts to give it a real impact of design there's another one I can do that's the same principle of starting with that inside shape and then repeating it and this one's called build a bridge and as the name implies it needs to be built onto something so whether that be onto the ditch or a border or onto the edge of an applique it needs to start on us on an edge as opposed to all these designs can just start in the middle of a quilt block so I'm just going to give myself a little ditch here as if I had an edge to start with and I'll be starting with an initial shape of just a little hump or like the letter in upside down there's my first initial shape and now I repeat it this time I'm going to repeat fairly parallel was before there was that exaggeration in the echoing this time it's quite parallel I might even use the width of the foot to help me with that eyeballing that shape [Music] so you can see why I call that one build a bridge and get over it it's kind of a rainbow design but from here I've done my initial shape and air code I'm now going to start back at that initial shape again but this time it's going to join on to the previous stitching there's my initial shape and now repeated again [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm gonna come down here and do it again in a much smaller scale more of a micro scale and we'll see how it looks [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so you can see in this design what's quite important is that that stitching comes up and goes you know backtracks back onto itself actually touches back onto the previous stitch line because then the visual effect is that one is underlying the next it actually looks like I must have started here because that one is underneath that one under this one under that one and yet we all know I actually started over here I love the optical illusion that this design gives there's also another variation of course as always variations I call this one Statue of Liberty [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there really is endless variations you can do with this design but they all start with that initial shape and then repeating the the echoing and the traveling around each shape something like this which is quite an intricate pattern I certainly wouldn't suggest you do this over a very busy print fabric something like a cave facet that's you know very busy with bright flowers etc you're putting a lot of effort there into your coding design and it's really going to be quite lost so something like this where you're really showing off your best patterns and best designs is when you do it on a plain area like this fabric here so in perhaps every alternating block where there's a planar area or in a border or something you really can't compete with a busy fabric so you wait for those open areas to release show off and shine with your best designs so let's have a look where we started off with our teardrops we started with that teardrop shape we then tried the love hearts which is really just a teardrop with a bit of a bump in it and then we had some triangles for a more abstract geometric look our fall leaves and then the same theory applies to our build a bridge so there's quite a few designs there for you to try so I hope you've enjoyed our teardrops and I'll see you all very soon bye bye [Music]

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 19,195

Rating: 4.9832401 out of 5

Keywords: Handi Quilter, Longarm, Sewing, Quilting, Quilts, Free-motion Quilting, Finishing Quilts, quilter, longarm quilt, quilting tips

Id: hRYEEzSX1rw

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019