Exploring with Machine Quilting Session 1: Introduction
National Quilters Circle EditorsDescription
Here, I will show lots of different quilts that use feather, flower and leaf motifs in their quilting. I will talk about why I chose those motifs for those particular quilts, how I determined the size and scale of the motifs used, what is working or not working with the quilting, what I would have done differently.
I believe that every quilter has their own flower within them their own feather within them, their own leaves within them. We all doodle things differently. We all draw things differently. I can't draw to save my life but I can quilt almost anything. I don't know why that works that way.
It just does. When I go to doodle something, it looks kind of clumsy and chunky and not smooth and pretty. But when I go to stitch it, it looks great. So even if you're not a good drawer you can be a great quilter. We're gonna be playing with some full frontal facing flowers meaning they're not little side flowers they're not little drooping flowers.
They're the full flower, looking straight at you. They're wonderful to use as design motifs and they can be used as Fill. Most people think they can't be used as fill but they're wonderful on borders and things like that. You're gonna learn the anatomy of a flower and how that flower is made and how I make my flowers. And you're gonna discover ways that are easier or harder for you to use when you make flowers.
And you're gonna find a way that is really comfortable for you. We're also gonna play with some leaves and leaves can be a lot of fun because they come in lots of different shapes and sizes and some have detail and some don't. And we're gonna explore, playing with lots of different leaf styles. And then we're gonna work on feathers. And feathers are a very traditional old fashion design that can be brought into the forefront of really contemporary quilts.
If that's what you make, they can be used in all sorts of ways highly decorative or as background fill. And each of us is gonna have our own unique take on that feather. The thing is that we're not gonna be doing any marking. We're going to be doing freestyle quilting. We're gonna do some drawing beforehand, some doodling, some sketching, and get comfortable with the way our bodies move when we're doing these stitch outs.
And what we're gonna be doing is basically training our bodies to do the movement of a flower and the movement of a leaf and the movement of the feather. One of the main reasons I like to do these designs is because they really pack a wallop. My preferred use for them is in whole cloth quilts. And that's what we have here. This is a piece of hand dyed velvet, and I love the velvet.
I didn't wanna cut it up. I wanted to use it whole, and I wanted to put something on it that would really kind of show off the movement that was happening on it. So the very first thing I did was take one of my stamps. This is just a hand-carved flower stamp and it's the exact same flower, I always stitch. It's the flower that comes out when I go to doodle a flour.
And in fact, I've been doodling this flour since I was in fifth grade at least because I found it on some old schoolwork. So apparently it's my flour. So I stamped that on the fabric in a color that was kind of in the fabric as a highlight. And then I put the quilt sandwich together with two layers of batting. Now, the reason I use two layers of batting is because I knew I would have areas with really heavy quilting, where the density is close together and then areas where the stitching is further apart.
And that close together stitching was gonna allow that further apart, stitching to poof and come forward. And I wanted that extra layer of batting there to fill that up. And we're seeing that right here, in this portion of the quilt. Here, we have a wonderful spray of feathers, a few little flowers here, flowers there, flowers here and this path sort of of straight lines separating the feathers here the feathers, the flowers. And then we have these tiny wonderful little circles that are surrounding those flowers.
These designs are working with each other to affect the surface of the quilt. We have areas that are receding because they're closely quilted and areas that are coming forward because they have wider areas where there is no stitching. The feathers are drawing attention because of that. In this next piece, the flowers and feathers are used very decoratively and we see them here in these two circles. Here we have an all over feather.
It's just kind of meandering through that circle. The feathers are moving in different directions. They're tiny, and it's a wonderful way to explore ways of making feathers fit into space. Here I've got flowers and they're doing sort of the same thing. They're filling in space.
It's an all over flower. Here we've got a flower used as a center and here we've got another flower used as a center. And a different type of flower there. More flowers here. And another flower here, now all of these flowers were quilted before they were colored.
This was a piece of white fabric. I did all of the quilting and then I went in and colored them. So this was simply a free motion. Freestyle stitched flower, no marking was done except for the outside circle. No marking was done on this one at all.
Cause there was no circle that it was kept in. It's simply a motion that my body now remembers. Here we have very, very, very ornate feathers. So these feathers started out with their original color, which was the hot pink. And then a second layer was added in the blue.
And then another layer of detail was added with the yellow. They also have a wide spine that has a decorative circular design inside. They're made to fit into each other and fit into a circle. So you'll learn how to manipulate the shape of those feathers for the shape of your piecing. Again, we have an all over a flower but we're using multiple colors of thread and that adds lots of interest.
And that's one of the things that I really like to do is bring different thread colors together in a stitch out. Here we have some wonderful, very decorative leaves. And over here, we have a nice all over leaf pattern. That creates a great fill. So as I said earlier, we can use some of these decorative motifs as fill.
Fill is what we put in the background spaces of our quilts, rather than in the foreground spaces of our quilts. So here, this whole background is quilted with some meandering or floating about flowers. You can see this one really well because the stitching is green and it's on this kind of hot pink area. Whereas these sort of, kind of meld into the background because the thread color is the same color as the stitching or as the background. But the flowers are really packing a wall up because they're filling in a lot of negative space and adding some visual interests that was needed in the area.
They're poofing. Not because I put extra batting in here, but because the stones or the little tiny circles that are stitched around them are so tiny and they're physically pulling that background area back and allowing that quilted area to come forward. A lot of times leaves or vines and feathers are used in borders and in sashing and here that's what I've done. In this portion of the quilt, I used a vine. And again, this is something that you're gonna come up with your own personal fill for, what your vines, what your leaves look like.
The other half of the quilt I used feathers instead. I wouldn't normally do that but I wanted to show some options that you can use in sashing using these wonderful motifs. So here the feathers are moving in different directions and here the leaves are moving in different directions and you can play with that and move the eye of the viewer across the surface of the quilt. By what direction you have your motifs moving in. For this small piece, this is again something that I stitched first and colored afterwards.
So I came in and I stitched these blocks and I used a contrasting thread for the negative space knowing that, I was going to color in these big flowers. Once the colors were added to those flowers I knew exactly what kind of fabric I was going to use for the background. I also knew immediately that these flowers would get noticed more. If I added more flowers to my negative space but if I added them in such a way that they didn't compete. Now, if I had gone in here and colored these in then I would have made a competition.
And the, I wouldn't know whether to go to the main focal point flowers or to the flowers back here. So I stitched them in instead and left them and uncolored. And it's just that hint that reminds us that the flowers are important. Here they're acting as an all over fill, along with stippling. Whatever you surround your flowers with needs to be quite a bit smaller than the flower itself.
So that, that pushes that area back. And again, allows that flower to come forward. In this quilt, I used flowers in the border and this is one of my favorite all-time quilts. And I have probably laundered it at least 50 times. So it gets a lot of wear and tear, but it's holding up really well, because it's quilted really closely.
Here we've got a meandering flower design with leaves and then everything is echo quilted, meaning that I've stitched a quarter inch away from those flowers and a quarter inch away from that. And then a quarter inch away from that as well as the leaves. And so it's like this wonderful garden area out here in this border and flowers are fabulous design to use in borders. So I hope you can see here that there's some really fun things that we can do with these flowers and feathers and leaves. And it's a great way to add a nice punch but also some extra beauty to the surface of your quilts.
So we're gonna start by playing with full frontal flowers.
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