I am always on the look out for ideas for FREE MOTION quilting. I’ve purchased books and searched the Internet for free motion ideas but so often the ideas are shown in a square shape. I guess this is the “traditional” quilt approach but it doesn’t often translate to my contemporary quilt piecing shapes or designs. I’m also not interested in the carefully drawn or template designed free motion quilting. I am a quilter who finishes piecing a quilt and then must contemplate what to do! Sometimes this can take days! I might try sketching though this is not my strong suit (I’m an artist who can’t draw!). Recently I finished a custom quilt which was quite large and had a wide variety of free motion stitch designs. This got me thinking….a blog topic could be “What MOTION for my Free Motion?”
I’ve attached a picture of one of my art quilts which has unusual shapes which required more creativity in the free motion decision making process. This quilt is called “Box of Crayons” though a young woman with more imagination than me named it “women in tights”. It is one of the few designs I’ve created with white fabric involved. I somewhat randomly (as the spirit moved me) decided to quilt some colors together yet others independently. I also tried to use a somewhat straight line design beside a curved design just for contrast most of the time. And I changed thread color a lot.
The second picture, which I made larger in size, is of the back of this quilt where
you can more easily see the free motion stitching. I use my walking foot for the somewhat straight line designs and I use my darning foot for the free motion curved designs. I have one of the Bernina Stitch Regulator feet (I try not to think of what I paid for this!) and after several returns to the dealer and many many efforts trying to get it to work properly, I gave up and now use the non-technically sophisticated darning foot. I did learn that when I had a loaner Bernina 780, the BSR performed perfectly which tells me there is something in my 750 that is not working properly. But I digress……
Many of my contemporary quilts have curved, somewhat linear piecing which lends itself to creativity of free motion stitching. I hope you can get some ideas for how to combine and mix/match free motion stitching in an art quilt.
Your quilting designs are really imaginative. Interestingly, when I see other people’s quilting, I think it’s just perfect for their quilt, but I don’t generate quilting ideas for my own work. It doesn’t seem to be in my genetics to think like that, unfortunately, so I’m lucky to get the quilting done at all. Maybe I need a class in quilt-doodling! 🙂