Quilting Motifs vs. Fills - What’s the Difference?

When I was teaching quilting full-time, the most common class that I've taught was machine quilting. And it seems to be the area that catches people up the most. There's a lot of misinformation out there and there's a lot of information that people hand out and act as though it's empirical. We can all find our own ways when it comes to machine quilting, once we have some basic understanding of how the stitch line affects the quilt. And it's one of the things that is the most least often taught.

And in my opinion is one of the most important aspects of machine quilting. When we add a line of machine quilting and a line of stitch to the surface of a quilt, we change what's already happening on that surface. And we do it in such a way that it can impact the piece design as well as the design of the fabrics. So we need to have an understanding of how those lines are going to affect the quilt. And one of the first things we need to have a really good understanding of is the difference between a motif and fill.

Fill is the types of stitches that we use to fill in space, usually negative space, but not always sometimes we're filling in positive space. But we're filling it in with something that is an all over design. A motif is a thing. A circle is a motif. A flower is a motif.

A leaf is a motif. These are things that we're adding onto the surface of the quilt. And every time we add a motif to the surface of the quilt, we are adding a new design element. Now our quilt is already made for- made up of all sorts of design elements. The blocks that we pieced or the applique that we did, the fabrics that we chose and the designs that are on those are all design elements.

Where we put lights and darks is a design element. So we must be careful when we add new design elements such as motifs. We need to understand how that motif is going to affect the surface that we already have going. Now, sometimes a stitch-out that would- a stitch-out is simply a design of the stitching that we're doing. Sometimes a stitch-out can play as a motif in some areas and play as a fill in other areas.

It depends on how it's used. When we look at these three small pieces here, this quilt was, you know, nothing but a piece of white fabric. And I stitched these big leaves, and then I stitched these designs in the long rows next to it. And then I went in and I colored it with Shiva Paintstiks and it became alive because when it was just the stitching it was white stitching on white fabric and you didn't see things very well. But these leaves are definitely motifs.

I can point to the leaf and say, there is a leaf. And when I look at it the first time, it is those three leaves that my eye is drawn to. And that me it's a motif. This is the same type of thing. It's a leaf here, has high contrast with the background and it feels more like a motif than a fill.

These circles, however, are filling in space and it's repeated over and over in the same manner. And it doesn't feel as important as the leaves and therefore they become fill. But here we're gonna take the same type of leaf. And it is stitched in a high contrast. And because it's in a high contrast, it becomes motif.

Even though it's filling in all of this space, it draws our attention right into that area because we have a contrast between the bright green on the bright yellow. Had I stitched the leaves in yellow, it would have behaved as fill. Just filling in that area. We can see that happening here. We've got green leaves on green.

We've got high contrast in our words here, high contrast in our blocks, and so the leaves are not the first thing that we see. They are the actually kind of the last thing that we see. And they are behaving as fill. So here they are a motif. They draw our attention, motifs draw our attention.

And here they are a fill, they're simply filling in space. This is important as we're deciding how am I going to quilt this quilt. Because how you quilt that quilt affects how the viewer sees that quilt. Whether the viewer seeing that quilt on your bed, draped across the back of your couch, hanging on your wall. All of these things are important.

This quilt is filled with very many pieced designs. And I believe in respecting the pieced design, when I do my quilting. What that means is that very rarely does my quilt line cross over a pieced line. Instead, I keep my quilting in the area, in the area, in the area, instead of crossing over. Now, that being said, there's always exceptions to that rule like in the center portion here.

In this center portion here, when I made this quilt, this quilt is called "Center of my world." And when I made this quilt, I had these four units here that were making up this very irregular circle in the center, but we had a nice square on the outside and I was married and I had two children. And those four were for the four of us. By the time I got around to quilting it, I was no longer married. So I decided to put three flowers in one for me and one for each of my daughters. So instead of respecting those piecing lines, I put a flower here, a flower here, and a flower there.

And those flowers have become motifs because they draw your attention to this whole area, and of all the quilting in that area, that is what your eye sees. Those flowers are echoed. So in the negative space, I've got lines that continue the shape of those flowers and the leaves that attached to them. And those echoes become part of the fill. I use those flowers again, out here, along the outside edge.

I also use the echoing again. So here we've got flower motifs used over and over again in this big wide border with echo quilting in the background that acts as fill. Now, when I talked about respecting those piecing lines, there are other types of quilting in this piece that aren't necessarily a strong motif but they become a little bit of a motif. And I want us to concentrate on this border. And each side is different.

And each side I quilted to the piecing. In this little checkerboard section, I did gentle arcs from corner to corner. It basically becomes fill. I used a color that matched both fabrics well so it doesn't show up too much. It's not high in contrast.

And basically you just see the gentle curve that is formed. You don't really see any other shape formed in that area. The same was done in here. I took that gentle curve and I did it from corner to corner in half the triangles, and then I did simply wavy-curvy lines in the other half of the triangle. Something that was consistently and constant that I could move across the surface without having to knot off when I moved from block to block.

Whereas this area here, I chose not to put any quilting at all in these tiny little triangles so that they poop off the surface. And I did the same gentle curve that I used here and here, in this blue corner to corner, corner to corner but I did it twice. And when I did that, it formed a motif. So now it looks like I have almost like a Holly leaf in each one of these blues. And the quilting draws your attention to that area.

That's what motifs do. It draws your attention to an area. I came out here and just like I didn't put any quilting in those, I didn't put any quilting in these greens. They're about the same size as those triangles. And that's about the largest area you can get away with, without quilting on a quilt that's going to be heavily used.

And this one is heavily used, believe me. But in here, these are flying geese. And this is a very non-traditional way to quilt a flying geese. Here I put long pedals. So each of these has four long pedals in them.

And those long pedals become a motif. They draw your eye to that color and you see their shape and their form. A fill is something that you don't look at. A motif is something that you do. So use those two things wisely, as you're considering, how am I going to quilt this quilt.

Motifs should be used in areas where you need more interest. If you put a motif in an area that already has a lot of visual interests, then what you do is you create a competitive thing between that motif and the things that are already present. And that's not what we want. What we want is for the quilting to augment, what's already happening on the surface of the quilt. What's already happening with our fabric selection, what's already happening with the way we pieced that quilt.

Very rarely does a quilt really need a whole lot more beauty added to it in the quilting. It simply needs lots of lines to hold those layers together. It's 2017, one of the most common- things in my opinion that's taking place in the quilting industry, is that quilts are being over quilted decoratively. They're not being over quilted for their use because the more you quilt a quilt, the longer that quilt is gonna last and that's all there is to it. But people are adding a lot of decorative quilting to quilts that are already decorative in their own right, with their piecing in their fabrics.

So if you really wanna show off your quilting, you've just, you've become really good at flowers or feathers or whatever, consider doing very simple piecing or doing whole cloth quilts. Those are great ways to show off fancy motifs. Whereas if you're doing lots of ornate piecing like this quilt has, keep your quilting styles to a minimum and respect the areas that you're quilting. Try not to cross over your piecing lines and try to draw out the areas of beauty that you wanna show off, and try to push back the areas that are unimportant. So fill goes in your negative space.

Occasionally a motif suits, a positive space well. However, keep it simple. Learn the difference and go back and look at some of the quilts you've made in the past and go back and look at some of the quilts you love in quilt books and see what they're doing. And chances are they're following this rule. Motifs belong in simple quilts, fill, fills negative space.

Make sure you can think of that when you go to decide on how you're gonna quilt your next quilt.