Tips for Machine Quilting Fillers around Feathers: Free-Motion Challenge Quilting Along

did you know that what you put around a quilting design is almost as important as closing the design itself in this video I'm gonna give you four things to think about when picking filler to put around your quilting designs these four things will help you highlight or hide your designs depending on how happy you are with them as a part of the free motion challenge quilting along we've been quilting feathers and in the last video we quilted some feathers in the background area of our quilt now we're going to pick the fillers that we want to put around that feather when picking the fillers to put around your quilting designs you need to think about how much contrast you want between the design and the filler and contrast is basically just a fancy sounding word for difference so if I want my main design such as the feather to show up more I'm gonna use designs around it that have a lot of differences to it if I want to hide it I'm gonna put stuff around it that's very similar and less different now there's four different ways that you can get contrast to your quilting designs there's the thread color that you use the shape of the design the density of the design and the direction if all four of those are different than the main design then you'll have a lot of contrast really making that design pop if all four of them are the same then it's going to help blend it in I have a quilted sample that'll show you exactly what I mean I've quilted the feather the same along the whole area but what I put around it is slightly different and it's really gonna illustrate how important it is to have contrast in your filler designs now the first thing we talked about the different thread color now that's not exactly on this sample but it makes sense right if your feather is quilted with a hot pink thread and you use a white thread around it you're really gonna see that hot pink thread no matter what kind of design that you do so changing thread colors is a first and easiest way to make the design pop but perhaps we don't want to change thread colors for our quilt or perhaps the quilt we're working on calls for it as one thread color so let's look at this example for the other three ways to provide contrast on this end of my big beautiful feather I'm using a filler that is similar in shape it's round and curvy like the feather and the density is slightly smaller than the feather itself but not a whole lot feather kind of blends in more than it will want to show you the other examples now as we move along the feather to this section we have that same shape we have that same design that swirl but the density is much smaller now density just refers to the spacing between the lines and so here I have the bigger feather the smaller filler and that's going to make it pop now moving along we see that I've kind of got crazy with a filler and put in those pebbles now the pebbles have a similar shape kind of they're still round and curvy but they're a lot tighter curves than the swirls it's nice and dense really helps that feather pop out even more then we move on to the furthest example of the feather around it I have some really dense back-and-forth lines they're much much more dense than that big feather they're also a different shape they're more linear more straight lined and more importantly they're a different direction this feather is moving horizontally where these back and forth lines are moving vertically it's almost as if I'm saying hey check this out this is pretty cool right here this is definitely and not a design that I'm gonna put around a feather that I'm not super happy with I have another example where we can see this in action with thread color that matches the quilt top it's the same exact illustration just with a different type of design in this beautiful green area i've quilted the swirl chain design if you want to learn how to quilt it I do have a video that shows you how to do this there's our swirl chain you'll notice my filler is very similar in shape because it's more swirls it's very similar in density and it pretty much helps that swirl chain blend in now I would probably do this if I didn't want this world chain to stand out too much maybe I want it to be more of a subtle element or maybe I've pulled it and I thought you know what oh that didn't turn out like I wanted it to then I can feel it around it and hide it moving along we can see that I started moving into serpentine lines as fillers now the reason that they work is because they're going in a different direction even though they still are curvy a little bit and they're the same density having that different direction is what's going to help kind of make it stand out a little bit more so not quite so blend in but not quite so in-your-face as the more extreme example but once you get to the end again you can see those back-and-forth lines they're really dense they're going a different direction and they're just really helping that pop and that's even if I'm using a thread color that's closer - the fabric color alright I know you're thinking more and more show me more okay well even if you're not just one more quick example in this gray strip I don't necessarily have a motif per se I have some wavy lines with some filler but in some of the areas I decided to do a different filler to kind of make this main area stand out now what I have here are overlapping ribbing candies which are really fun to quilt but we'll get into that in another video another example of a design that has a different direction so even though it's still curvy it's not a whole lot more dense it does have that vertical direction and it subtly lets it stand out but not too much and then here another example of those serpentine lines on either side a little bit more subtle different direction but still same density so the idea is whatever you put around your design is really what's going to help highlight or hide it so let's go back to the feather that we're quilting for our challenge if you remember we quilted that feather in the background area and we love some space on either side so that we could fill and around it with different designs now that you have a few things to think about you can pick your filler designs based on how much you love the feather that you've just quilted if you bought the thread collections and your quilting along with the same thread colors I'm hoping that you use the pink to quilt your feathers whether it's the pink and the glide or the darker pink in the aurifil thread collection if you're wanting to hide your feathers I would use the same color of thread as the filler but if you quilted your feathers and you're like dang Angela was right these are easy I really want everybody to see them then you can pick one of the other two colors if you want something a little bit in the middle of the road like you're thinking I want a tiptoe into that pool of Awesome but I don't want to jump right in then go ahead and use a slightly darker the yellow or the light pink and the reason is not because it's different from the background but because it's closer in color to the element that we quilted and since I have my feather in the brown I really want you to be able to see what I'm doing as much as I want to use the pink and the light yellow I'm gonna stick with the tan so that you can see what I'm doing all right let's get quilting if you're looking for a design that's pretty similar to a feather your best bet is going to be a swirl it has that nice curved ebook and you can decide how dense to make it right now I'm going to quilt it a little bit bigger making it more similar in size to the feather let's look at a couple other designs that you could quilt if you're wanting to make the fillers more similar to your feather you could do just a regular meander or you could do it looping the Under [Music] as you begin to fill in your background areas there's a chance you're going to run into some tricky areas for instance inside of these swirls I always say that people will notice a gap in the quilting before they notice an error so make sure you fill in those areas with whatever design you feel like quilting while filling in all these irregular shapes can be a little frustrating you're really going to appreciate knowing how to do this when you start working on other kinds of quilts trust me you'll thank me for this one day if your quilting along with me on the panel as you start to run into this area with the design just go ahead and work around it leaving it unfiltered because we're going to come back to the very last week and talk about putting in that area echoing is also another great way to highlight your design echoing almost acts like a parenthesis separating the design itself from the filler so I'm going to go ahead and go around my feather then fill in the space between them with a different filler design I'm gonna fill in around the smaller feathers with a design that's more dense and goes in a different direction I'm using the wishbone design it's kind of my favorite right now I just love how fast the wishbone is to close and how great it looks next to other designs now as your quilting along your feathers you're gonna run into areas where you don't have a lot of space so I'm gonna use echoing to fill in that area if I'm wanting to show off the feather I'm going to make my echo lines closer together so they're more dense than the feather but if I'm not wanting the feather to really stand out I might just quote one echo line or use a design that's curvy intense maybe like a bass and Lander or a looping and ER or if you're feeling adventurous you can pull the back-and-forth line now I'm going to quilt some swirls on my long arm making them a little bit bigger to help make that feather blend in [Music] if your quilting along on the panel go ahead and fill in the area around your feathers with the filler of your choice if you don't have a panel no worries in the quilting diagrams I give you instructions on how to mark your fabric so that you can clip on with us for the wishbone and the swirls and all the other designs that you see me quilting if you check out the description box below I have links to several tutorials where I show you how to cool to each of these fillers and I'll see you back here next week on Monday to talk about quilting feathers in irregular shapes now in the meantime if you have any questions just leave them in the comments below and like every week I have quilting diagrams with tips and tricks you can find all of that in the description box below and I hope you do download them because I want to give you everything that you need to be successful with the designs that we're learning well I'll see you next week happy quilting

Channel: Angela Walters

Views: 50,039

Rating: 4.9633589 out of 5

Keywords: #freemotionchallenge, angela walters quilting, feathers, machine quilting feather motifs, angela walters quilting is my therapy, angela walters quilting challenge, angela walters quilting feathers, angela walters quilting along, angela walters quilting videos, angela walters quilting tutorials, machine quilting fillers, machine quilting on a sewing machine, free quilting tutorials, machine quilting on a regular sewing machine, beginner free motion quilting tutorials

Id: W7ZupVLFv4k

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Mon May 28 2018