How Should I Quilt This Quilt? Session 1: Introduction

One of the worst things that can happen to a quilt in my opinion, is for a beautiful top to be, for lack of a better word, misquilted. Quilted in such a way that it doesn't bring out the beauty that was present or enhance the beauty that was present. Or worse yet, one of the things that's very popular to do now is, it's so overtly quilted, so extravagantly quilted that it competes or fights with the fabrics that are present and the designs and the piecing that are present. There are lots of ways to get around that. And I want to, kind of, introduce you to some of the basic ideas behind my theories and I think some of the standards theories, about how to quilt a surface of a quilt so that it brings out its beauty.

The quilting should hold the three layers of the quilt together and serve its lifetime so that it holds those layers together in such a way that it doesn't wear and tear and break down the surface of the quilt. That's its function, its main function. But it's secondary function is to add to the beauty of the quilt, not deplete from the beauty of the quilt. So for that to happen, we need to understand how that quilting line affects the surface of the quilt and how to best use what we know how to do to make those things happen. When we quilt, we're quilting using a couple of different stylizations, if you will, we quilt with motifs.

That's something that we can put a name, to a flower is a motif. A leaf is a motif. A feather is a motif. And we quilt with fills or background designs. And probably the most common would be a stipple but we also have loop de loops and we have swirls and things like that.

And we quilt in different densities. And this is one of the things that I really want to push home in this class is that you understand how the density of the quilting, which means how close the stitch lines are or how far apart the stitch lines are, how that density affects the depth of the quilt. What it comes down to is you can't fight the physics of quilting. The more heavily you quilt something, the more that something is going to recede. The less heavily you quilt something more that something is gonna come forward.

So when we look at this section here, with these large flower motifs with very little quilting inside this area of about two inches, surrounded by stippling, which is a fill or a background design. This is quilted about every half of an inch, that's its density about every half inch. It pushes that background back and allows the petals of that flower to come forward because they have no quilting in them and they are poofy, if you will. So density affects the sense of depth. It's also important to understand how different stitches relate to each other.

And one of my tricks is to, when I'm choosing what type of quilting goes in what area, is to work curvy off of straight. So if I have a curvy stipple in one area, the area next to it, I want something straighter. It doesn't have to be totally straight but straighter. So here I've got this interlocking squares and rectangles that have straighter lines next to a very curvy stipple next to a less curvy, gentle arc. And so when we play off of each other with these different types of stitching, we add visual interest where we want it and we have what's called spatial delineation.

Meaning it's keeping this area separate from that area. The machine quilting is going to affect the quilt top greatly, understanding how is half the battle. Improving your stitching is the other half of the battle. But you can be an amazing stitcher, but if you don't know how or predict how or understand how those stitch choices are gonna affect the quilt, then your quilts are never gonna sing the way they could. So come along, we're gonna look at a whole bunch of quilts, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Get a good understanding of what's happening on the surface. And once we understand what's happening on the surface we can determine why that's happening. What we could have done differently and if we had done it differently, would it be better or simply different. But we're gonna learn how to quilt that quilt. And we're gonna start with understanding depth.