Triangle Quilt: Quilting Triangles In Your Design

Machine quilting is just so very popular right now and everybody is trying to outdo each other in beautiful, over-the-top, wonderful machine quilting. But I've noticed that a lot of people forget about the fact that they could be quilting with more angular designs. They're usually using lots of soft curves and floral elements and things like that. Angled designs add a whole bunch of energy to the surface. This is simply triangles, and they're just continuous triangles. They cross over each other to make more triangles. There's the occasional other kind of shape thrown in there, here and about. But it's tight with angles and those angles add this wonderful energy. Here on this piece, I already had this yellow background that was very energetic, with a high contrast of black and white, also very energetic. These bold, black flowers I knew I was gonna be stenciling on after all the quilting was done. So I decided to not only quilt with some contrast in color but to add angles in the negative space. Now, I kept it somewhat quiet by using the same color of thread as the fabric. But those angles allow that background to kind of pull all these very, very bold entities together and make them all work with each other. So those angles are really doing a lot of work and doing it well. With this piece, the only place there are angles is here in the black. I wanted the black to balance with this portion a little bit better than it was. Before it was quilted, when it was just the solid piece of black with no texture in it, it kind of just wilted away into the background and couldn't hold its own against this piece at all. I want it to look like this was floating on top of this as a unified background, so I needed to add more energy to this piece because this one has the direct complements of the black and the white. It's very energetic. And because it has lines moving in all sorts of directions, that adds more energy. As soon as I quilted this with all these wonderful angles, it perked it up. And even though it's quilted in black, it's a very bright black whereas its fabric is a very dull black. So it adds a little, tiny bit of contrast in color too. But those angles are doing all the work. And finally, in this one, when I finished it, it was just so soft, so delicate. And I wanted to add something to it. The first thing I did was quilt here with circles which really did add something to it because everything else was kind of very straight-edged, squares and rectangles, so the curve added a lot. I thought about stippling in here but then I felt that if I stippled with a curvy stipple, it would deplete the power of the circles here. So, I brought those angles in here, brought that energy in here with a pink that's slightly more deep than the pink of the background there. And again, it worked wonders. So next time you're thinking about what am I gonna quilt in my negative space, look at your piece and ask if it could use a little bit more energy. And if that's what it's calling for, consider quilting with angles, triangles, any type of angle in the background.