Free Motion Border Quilting with Circles and Squares

Machine quilting can be so much fun. However, a lot of people tend to mark things and if I have to mark it, I just don't want to do it. But I am willing to do a little tiny bit of marking to get a nice finished result. With a border like this, the only marking that I did was simply draw a straight line here and a straight line here which delineated the different designs that I have. So these lines are where I'm going to put in circles.

And then the spaces in between is where I'm going to put in squares. In addition to those lines here, I then put lines here, every two inches so that each of my squares would be approximately the same size too. All of this marking can be done really lightly with chalk making sure it's chalk, not a chalk pencil or with a Hera marker or with a sharpened anything. So here, you can see this little crease and that was made by putting down a ruler and running my sharp scissors across there. And that's all I used was a pair of sharp scissors and marked a crease.

Okay. So in this outer border I stitched with my walking foot these long lines and I would go all the way around my whole quilt and do those lines first with my walking foot. And then I'd put my free motion foot on and come in and do my circles next, or my squares next, either one it doesn't matter because those lines are already there. They're already kind of occupied the space but let me show you how simple these circles are to do. They're basically a continuous circle or circle eight.

So you're gonna be drawing the letter eight. So a circle that touches the top line and the bottom line circles back around to the next circle, circles back around to the next circle. And you just keep circling around and adding another circle until you get to the end. And so I would do a whole, all four borders with one side of circles and then go around and do all four borders with the other side of circles then go back and do all four borders with my inner squares. This really helps all of your circles be approximately the same size.

And there we go. So very simple, basically all the same size, easy to do circles. Then I'm going to come back and I'm just going to add on to where I ended off here. And this happens a lot. We all run out of bobbin or our thread breaks whatever, we have to be able to add on.

My thread color is a little different here. So you're going to see that add on but it should be neat and tidy. And so I'm simply going to nod off by taking one or two little stitches and then head over, do my, basically a square swirl. So I'm going to do this by making the square itself that keeps moving in on itself, leaving about a half inch channel to come back out. So I can stitch that stitch line.

That's in the middle of the stitch line I've already done to make myself come back out so that the design can be continuous. So I'm going to head over and make my square, leaving about a half inch between my original stitch lines. And then in the middle of those stitch lines, put my return line and then head over to make my next square. So again, I'm going to make my square, Are they all exactly the same? No, because you know what, I'm a human making them not a computer making them.

They're all going to be slightly different, and that difference is going to add beauty not deplete. Onto my next square. And so on, so easy, and so effective. Such a great modern design, can be masculine, you could do it on a guy's quilt and so fun and easy to do. Give this a try, mark out that border, circle something curvy, straight, squares.

It's a lot of fun. I think you can do it easily. And I think you'll really like your end results.