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How to Quilt>Quilting Designs
Your Quilting Stitches Can Create A Design With the Fabric in Your Quilt
When quilting daughter, Stephanie, was in first grade, she drew a picture of a rainbow. I'm not sure whose idea it was, but the simple drawing became the design for a quilt. At the time, some quilters were creating truly 3 dimensional quilts by sewing strips of fabric between strips of fabric. Now that sounds pretty strange, and it works like this. You take a background design - in this case the rainbow - and sew it together in sections of long, narrow strips, generally adding seam allowances. The idea is that you will be sewing those pieces together Then you take sets of strips that you have sewn together and folded wrong sides together. In the case of the rainbow quilt, I sewed a white strip to a grey strip, and then folded it wrong sides together so one side was white, the other was grey. One edge had a seam, the other edge was the raw fabric. The next step is to sew the folded strips between your background strips so that the folded strips stick out and are perpendicular to the background. It almost looks like the blinds on a window. (In my case they were vertical blinds.)
The next question was what to do with the strips. There were many interesting ideas to choose from and the challenge was how to keep them in place. I had decided that I wanted the strips above the rainbow to show the white - looking like clouds - and the strips below to look grey, like rain. When I added the borders, I sewed the top of the strips so they showed the white and the bottom so they would be grey. But that wasn't enough. The center of the strips just did whatever they wanted to do, without a design or any consistency. I ironed them down the way I wanted them to be, but they wouldn't stay folded over. Finally I decided that the only way to keep them folded over was to sew a quilting stitch along the top edge of the rainbow. Yes, I could have just tacked them in place, but I decided that the quilting stitch would be better. In addition to quilting the strips, I quilted "in the ditch" on the background strips. After my experience with the 3 dimensional space blocks quilt, I wanted to be sure that the quilt top was going to stay in place when I hung it up.
Another Example In an earlier article, I showed one example of a quilting design possibility for a Snowball block, which is mostly solid fabric. In the example, the fabric was muslin - an all time plain solid, boring fabric. Solid fabric is a great place for an interesting quilting design, since it will show up.
Another possibility is to basically extend your blocks using a quilting design. In the Butterfly quilt on the left, my mother-in-law gave me a stack of these butterfly applique blocks she had made when she was a child. And she told me I could do whatever I wanted with them. There were a bunch of them, and they were on a very loose weave cotton. I didn't want to make a quilt that anyone would use because I knew they couldn't be washed, and I thought that with use the background fabric would fall apart. So I decided to make a quilt for each one of her grandchildren - there were 5, plus one son who had no children and I didn't want to leave him out. So, 6 quilts to be made, and really only 4-5 blocks for each quilt. To enlarge the size of the wallhanging while not taking away from the focus of the butterflies, I decided to alternate blocks of solid fabric, and then quilt butterflies in each of the solid blocks. For the quilting design, I made a plastic template of the outside of the butterfly with slits showing the separation between the top and bottom wings and the body. I marked the outlines on the quilt, and filled in the wings and quilted the antenna freehand. Click on the image for a closer view of the quilting on the butterfly.
Happy Quilting!
Penny Halgren www.Rag-Quilt-Instructions.com ©2009, Penny Halgren
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