Contemporary Collage Session 6: Quilting Your Collage

So we're all basted, everything's in place, and we're ready to start our quilting. And we've thought a little bit about quilting along the way. I always try to think how I'm gonna quilt this quilt while I'm making the quilts, so that I can make good decisions. I know that I'm gonna be using three different colors of thread. I'm gonna use a very dull, medium-valued blue.

So it's a tone in the negative space. That tone is gonna help push things back. I'll use a red-violet that matches my red-violet fabric as good as I can possibly get it to match, which is almost a perfect match for the red-violet areas. And then I've got already loaded in my machine, a brighter blue. It's not really, really bright, but it's brighter than the background thread so that I can stitch around the flowers with that and highlight those flowers.

Now I'm gonna stitch the flowers first and then I'll stitch the red second and then I'll do my background quilting last. I'm also going to be using two different feet. It's important if you have the option to do this, I prefer to stitch with an open toe free motion foot, and I'll be using that as I'm stitching on the flowers and the circles. It helps me to see where I'm going better. And since I'm gonna be outlining it's important to be able to see really well.

But I'm gonna switch to a closed toe when I do this background here mainly because it will catch on the fabric less. And we know we have lots of raw edges that are kind of hanging up in that area and that open toe will catch more than a closed toe will. So we'll switch our foot when we get to that point. Now it's important that you kind of have an idea of what it is you're going to stitch. And so there are lots of options here.

What we don't want to do is draw attention where we don't want attention. We do want to leave attention where we want attention to be, however. So when it comes to these flowers, what I'm going to be doing is I'm simply going to outline the center of the flower. Possibly do a little bit of stitching in the middle through it, but not a whole lot. Then I'm going to outline the flower.

Then I'm going to stitch around here. If I heavily stitched this background, it would push it back and allow the flower to come forward more. But I'm not sure that's something that I want to do because I'm gonna be heavily stitching in here too. So I can always go back and do it again later. If it doesn't look the way I want it to look.

So for right now, I'm gonna leave it alone. I'm going to be stitching in the red with just straight lines outlining, but I'm also gonna come in here in the red and stitch lines in my white. And that's gonna add some interests there, some high contrast there, which will also push your eye back to those flowers again. Now with the circles, I'm really, really tempted, and I get tempted a lot to do a swirl in my circle. But if I do that, it's gonna be adding a design in there that might make it compete, might make it come to the foreground more, and make it compete with my flower.

So that's probably not the best idea. So right now I'm really not quite sure what I'm gonna do in those circles, but whatever I do, I want it to quiet it down and push it back a bit and not get too much attention. I might do a simple cross hatch in there. That would be very, very simple and push it back at the same time. So we'll see what happens along the way.

So again, you want that free motion foot to be on. And luckily our flowers are in the center-most area. So we get to start in the center-most area of our quilt and we're gonna be doing some relatively simple quilting. I'm gonna just do a little cross sort of where there's blue in the center of the flower. Then surround that center, then go around the outside of the flower, then go around the inside of the flower block itself, and then move to the next flower.

So I'm gonna be knotting off... first and I'm gonna be doing this without doing a whole lot of cutting my threads or anything like that. I'll be clipping in between afterwards. So I'm gonna stitch a cross. And that's just gonna hold that center down and not make it too poofy.

And then I'm gonna stitch around that center. And I'm gonna knot off. So I'm just gonna stitch back and forth ever so slightly, travel to the outside of that flower, stitch back and forth ever so slightly again, and stitch around the outside edge of that flower. I don't want this thread getting in my way or being stitched over, so I'm gonna ahead and clip it. You can see already that that foot wants to grab that edge, so pay attention as you're going.

Okay, so the flower's stitched. I'm gonna go to the outside edge now. And this is an option that you get to choose, "How close do I stitch through the edge?" Well, I like to keep my stitch line approximately an eighth of an inch away from the edge. If you wanted to you could switch to your walking foot or your regular foot, and not have to deal with free motioning a crooked line, but I'm playing with crooked lines all the time here. So it's okay with me if my line is crooked because my rips are set up crooked.

I don't have anything that is true. And so the more crooked, the more it looks like it belongs, building that unity. Just getting rid of some of these loose threads. If I feel like I'm gonna be caught on something or something's lifted up, just stop for a minute and renegotiate. So our first flower is finished.

Again, I'm not gonna cut that thread. I'm gonna travel to the next flower. I'm gonna make sure that I don't have any issues that I feel like I'm gonna have to deal with later. And I'm gonna head down here or over here to this flower, go back to the center again... knot off, stitch that little X sort of design, and then go around the flower center.

And then around the petals. I'm gonna see if I can, yes, I can. I can just kind of travel under here, go all the way around that petal. And again, I'm gonna clip those threads. I just realized that I didn't have my needle in the needle down position.

Remember to put your needle in the needle down position, so that when you stop stitching, your needle stays right where you want it. Raw edge is getting in the way. Now we're ready to go all the way around. If I see that I'm having some issues on the edges when I get close, if I put a pin right in there I can keep that from happening. So I'm gonna kind of get underneath here again insert my foot under there, so that I can start under that white.

We're just gonna go all the way around that flower again. If I feel like I'm getting any fullness, I'll work it out. Or at least try to work it out. My nice crooked lines. And again, I'm gonna just lift this up a bit and travel underneath there to get to where I need to go.

Lift that up a bit and finish underneath. So I'm being told something right now, and I only know this because I'm paying attention and I know what I'm being told. And what I'm being told is that I'm likely gonna have to quilt in this negative space because I'm getting some fullness. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that real quick while I'm here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a stitch design in there that's gonna add to the interest of the flower.

Most people would go, "Oh, well, she's just gonna stipple in there." No, I'm gonna do lines that move out of here diagonally. And what's that's gonna do is push your vision into the flower and then away from the flower. So I'll show you that real quick. And that's one of the nice things about having an idea of what you're doing, but at the same time, it's okay if you change your mind. I'm gonna keep these lines really close to each other, about an eighth of an inch apart.

You can see that I'm keeping them very wobbly. And that they're radiating out of the center of the flower. I've got this big chunk of fullness in here and to make sure that doesn't get caught up too much in my quilting, I'm gonna sort of stretch it out and put a straight pin in here. And that's gonna make it lay flat before I start quilting it and make me have a better opportunity to have it not having any puckers when I finish. And we have no puckers in there, which is quite nice.

And I'm gonna travel over just to finish up this last little bit over here. And this is actually really, really showing off this flower now very nicely. Clip this thread out of the way. So now we can actually do a nice little compare and contrast between these two flowers. Look at the difference, that's pretty amazing.

So this flower is really, really poofing off the surface because we heavily quilted that background and pushed it back. We can see this flower so much more than we can see this flower over here because we've added this slightly contrasting thread. It's darker than the flower itself bringing our eye there. Here, the flowers outlined which caused it to poof a little bit, but the background's also poofy because it's outlined. So when we go in and push that back, it's gonna make this flower come forward even more.

So that's how we're gonna quilt all three flowers. And that's really gonna draw the flowers out quite a bit. I'm gonna go ahead and switch to my red-violet thread and well, actually I'm not, I'm gonna stitch the circle first. Then I'll switch to the red-violet thread. So you can see how this whole portion looks with its quilting done.

And then we'll move to the background a bit. So I have to decide what I'm gonna do with this circle. I want to add no visual interest really to it, so I don't want to put anything decorative. I don't want to put a circle in there. I don't want to put just anything that's gonna get too much attention.

And so back here, I'm going stipple, so I don't want to stipple here. But I do want it to go back away. So I'm gonna go ahead and put in a cross hatch, which is a repeat of this line here. But this line is moving diagonally and away from this circle, I mean, from the flower. Here I'm gonna put a straight cross hatch going in both directions.

It'll push that circle back. I'm gonna outline the circle first and then go from there. And now I'm going to stitch the white. Oh no, I'm not, cause the white I'm gonna stitch down with that red-violet thread. So I'm done with that blue.

Oh, good, that pushed it back really nicely. And it's kind of boring quilting. So it's working the way I wanted it to work. So my circle now feels less important than my flower. That flower's coming forward really well.

Very simple quilting pushing that circle back. So we're gonna switch to our red-violet. I always match my bobbin thread to my top thread. That way I'm assured that even if I have a tension issue I don't have any polka dot of one color coming through to the top or the bottom. So we'll switch our bobbin also.

Now there's a lot being said right now about machine quilting and the artistry of machine quilting. And you can certainly become a perfectionist with machine quilting and do some very, very ornate, fabulous quilting. And I can quilt with the best in them, I believe. But there are times when I think it's important and times when I think that it's just ego for a quilt like this, it would be ego to really worry about how fabulous the quilting is. The quilting is augmenting.

It's not the major part and I want to get her done. And so sometimes if I just want to get her done I'm just gonna get in there and quilt. So yes, I'm not being perfect. My lines aren't always lining up and in the long run it's simply gonna add to the artistry of this already kind of loose piece anyway. And if the quilting were too tight and too perfect it actually would probably look like it doesn't belong.

So it's a good thing all the way around. So again, I'm gonna stitch this white down with this red-violet thread. Which is gonna draw your eye to that square that has that flower in it, that contrast. And then while I'm doing this I'm gonna go ahead and stitch down the red-violet also. So whatever I get to that's red-violet I'll hit when I get there.

I'm gonna go ahead and get the edge of this white on this circle block also with the red-violet. And we're doing that for unity, since we're already stitching this white down, we'll do this white also. So this quilting is adding nothing to the piece in the red-violet portion, but it's adding contrast to the piece in the white portion. So this is gonna give us a feel for how this red-violet is going to look and what it's gonna do for the block. So what we have going on so far, and it's good to understand what it is that we're seeing.

So what we have going on so far is flower coming forward because it has little to no quilting in it. The surrounding area behind it going backwards because it has a lot of quilting in it. Almost no quilting in the red, just enough to hold it down in a thread that matches that fabric as close to perfect as we can get. A slight contrast line here in the white using that red. Again, you can see that it kind of elongates the feel of the red-violet and it actually highlights that whole block area.

And that's what we wanted to do so that it has more contrast to its negative space. So I'm gonna finish, I mean, I'm gonna be done for the time being of working on these motifs, and I'm gonna go ahead and come into the background. And I'm gonna quilt this background very, very heavily. I'm gonna do it with a very neutrally type of thread, a thread that is a tone. Anytime you want an area to be very quiet in it's quilting, choose a tone as your color.

It's going to soften that whole area because tones have gray or the direct compliment of the color added and they're very dull. And it's that dullness that we're after. All of the threads that I'm using on this piece are 50 weight, which is what I quilt most of my work with. If it were a bed quilt, I would go to a 40 weight, but this is a wall piece. So what I'm gonna do in this negative space is a relatively small stipple.

Not a micro stipple, but a small stipple. I'm gonna start of course in the area around the area that I've already stitched. I'm going to try to make sure that I don't lift up any edges of my background fabrics. And I'm gonna try to make sure that I stitch down as many of the edges of my background fabrics. So here we go.

I'm also gonna switch very quickly. If I have anything that gets caught, I'll just make sure that I can cut that away or tear that away if it's just a thread or a fiber from the fabric. So what you see, I keep running into is that lifting of the fabric. I was gonna change my foot and I forgot to. So I'm just gonna have to deal with it for right now.

So I'm just gonna quilt this portion that's around this particular flower, so you can get a real good feel for how this whole thing is going to look. So it's just amazing to me what happens as we stitch this wonderful collage portion down here. You can see how it's laying very nicely and flatly in this background compared to what isn't stitched. And it's sitting behind this flower, meaning that it's in the plane underneath that flower. The stippling done with this tonal color of thread doesn't get a whole lot of attention.

Of course, if it's in a lighter area it will, even though it's a medium valued thread. But that's gonna happen if you have all those different values in your negative space or in any space that you're quilting. But the goal is for it not to compete with that which is in our mid-ground, which is the circle. And definitely not compete with what that which is in the foreground, which is our flower. Which is exactly what's happening.

It's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. And it's gonna serve our wonderful collage really, really well. So I'll continue working on this piece and I'll quilt all of the flowers in exactly the same way. I won't be tempted to do something different. I don't need to add variety at this point between the flowers.

I simply need variety between the flowers and the other elements. So the circles will get quilted exactly the same as this circle. Again, no added variety. We want to repeat for unity. And then the entire background will be stitched with this wonderful stipple, which is gonna push it back, not draw a whole lot of attention and make the background do exactly what we want the background to do, and that is sit in the background.

Our only final choice that we have here now is deciding how we're gonna finish the edge. We have so many options to us when it comes to a wall piece. And a lot of times we don't realize those options. We think that we have to stick a regular binding on our work, and I have to be honest, I can't tell you the last time I put a regular binding on a piece of work. I don't like doing bindings.

I don't think there are a lot of fun. So even if I were to put a binding on here I can guarantee you it would probably be a very raw or rough edge binding. I would rip my strips and simply fold one over to the front and one half over to the back. And that's it, stitch it down and call it a day. But chances are what I will do on this instead is a satin stitch.

And I will do it in this red-violet color. So I would simply go all the way around the outside edge with that satin stitch. Before doing that I would true everything up. So once the quilting is done, I would choose one corner to work from. And it would probably be a corner that has a flower in it.

So either this corner or this corner. The reason that's important is that if I were to start over here it could be by the time I get here that this flower ends up being really, really skewed. Not that that's a really big, bad thing, but it's best to kind of work with one of your motifs as a guide. So I would put my large square ruler in this corner here or that corner there and square up my edges. And then just finish the squaring from then on out.

This is a very, very fun way of doing a collage, of doing a quilt. I don't have to do any piecing. I don't have to worry about any math. I don't have to do anything that even resembles perfection. I get to work very organically.

I get to change my mind along the way. I get to have a lot of fun and play. So consider a collage for your next piece, instead of doing the math and doing the piecing and thinking with perfection in mind. Instead, think about neat and tidy in mind and putting something together that allows you to have total freedom and to simply play.