Hey Everyone, welcome to Free Motion Friday.
You may have noticed that I have changed the name of Friday from Colourful Friday to Free Motion Friday. I came to the end of my posts on colour and figured I would mix it up a bit and start doing some free motion quilting on Friday instead. Now and again I may pop in a post on colour especially if I come across something really cool or something really colourful. I hope that you will enjoy the free motion as much as you did the colour.
Last Sunday I found inspiration in a piece of paper towel that fell to the floor as I moved something off the table. My friend Ruth also found inspiration from the design on the paper towel and you can check out her post called Inspired by Another to see what she did with it.
Yesterday I talked about some different marking tools that are available to add quilting lines to the quilt top. This makes it easy to follow when doing either free motion quilting or using the walking foot. This particular design lends itself much better to the free motion foot rather than straight lines with the walking foot.
Motif transferred to fabric by drawing over design on mesh
Having added the motif to my fabric yesterday I set about quilting it today. My first attempt was free motion with a straight stitch. Initially I did the trunk and heart first then the curved branches off the trunk. I went over the trunk and heart a few times in order to make them stand out more.
The stem is quilted heaver than the loops giving the appearance of the loops receding into the quilt
My second attempt was still with the free motion foot but I switched to the zigzag stitch. I put the stitch length down to 0.5 and the width to 1.0. This made for a nice tight and compact stitch that made it easy to follow the lines of the design.
This motif was quilted with free motion zigzag
I personally like the zigzag best, but I do like how the loops recede into the background of the first one. A bit of a toss up maybe. Which is your favourite?
Now I believe that Ruth has some more ideas that revolve around this design so I will let you know when she posts something new.
Happy Quilting!
I really like this topic. How about more on quilting on our home machines. I have a Janome embroidery and a smaller Bernina.
Charlotte, I can talk about that. I do all of my quilting on my home machine which is a Bernina.
I learned of the mesh from a workshop through my Guild many months ago! But she used it for marking where words would go! Fabulous Thanks for sharing with us Jen! Julie