This week I have been OBSESSED with doodling. Quilty doodles that is! Several people were posting picture on Instagram with their daily quilty doodles and graffiti quilting drawings. (#dailyquiltyd…
Grafitti quilting is a style of free motion quilting where you take the different quilting designs you love and use them all, mixing them up and joining them together. I've admired the style for a long time, but I was intimidated by it, so I kept putting off trying it. This project seemed like the perfect one to finally give graffiti quilting a try. These blocks were made as tests to be sure my cutting directions were right for the blocks in my Friendship Galaxy baby quilt, and I have no plans for this quilt, so I figured if the quilting ruins it, it's no real loss. I don't think the quilting is ruining it, though! In fact, I really like it. I'm not quite halfway finished this mini quilt, but I thought I'd share a few things I've already learned about graffiti quilting. 1. Use a thread that doesn't blend. I've always tried to use a thread that blends with the fabric as much as possible because I wanted to hide all my mistakes. A few times with previous quilts, though, I've found it hard to keep track of where I've already quilted because the thread blended so well that I couldn't see the stitches. These background fabrics are grey and I'm using a lighter grey thread and I can see what I'm doing! I can't even imagine how hard this style would be if I couldn't see what I'd already quilted. Yes, you can see the imperfections, but I'm okay with that. 2. Bigger is better. The spaces around these double stars are pretty small, so I was trying to keep the scale of the quilting small too. I thought the whole graffiti style would be lost if I didn't squeeze a lot of designs into each space. It's hard to make the designs look neat at such a small scale, though. Once I moved out around the single star, where there's more room, I started making each design a little bigger and it is much easier to make them look neat. 3. Pebbles are a graffiti quilter's best friend. Pebbles fit anywhere! When I find myself in an awkwardly shaped space, I throw in a few pebbles to fill it up. When I don't know what to quilt next, I stitch a few more pebbles. When I want to move to the other side of a design I just finished...you guessed it, pebbles! 4. It's easier than it looks. I was intimidated by graffiti quilting because it looked complicated. It's not, though. It's just a matter of stitching one design a couple of times and then switching to something else. I pause a lot, look at what I've done and think about what I should do next. I turn the quilt a bit to allow myself to work from different angles to fill in those spaces. I'm still not comfortable with a lot of different designs, so there's a lot of repetition, but I think the graffiti style still comes through. 5. It's fun!! Need I say more? I'm sure I'll be using this style again. Have you tried graffiti quilting yet? Any lessons you've learned that you want to share? I'm linking up with Let's Bee Social, WIP Wednesday and NTT.
This week I have been OBSESSED with doodling. Quilty doodles that is! Several people were posting picture on Instagram with their daily quilty doodles and graffiti quilting drawings. (#dailyquiltyd…
I was struck the other day by this bit from Mr X's recent TEDx talk:
A graffiti quilting pattern and tutorial. This is a modern and beautiful quilt that uses fun and modern quilting fabrics.
Baseball quilt - posted in Quilt Pictures, Patterns & Inspiration...: Just finished making a baseball quilt for my daughter. She is hosting a ball reunion this fall so I made a baseball quilt to raffle off to off set some costs. This was a fun project that I did mostly on the long arm sashed a plain fabric and marked the stitching line with a frixion pen then put on my Maxine my Millie and applied the chenille strips now for the secret to fluffing it up.......Take your shop vac and vac...
I was struck the other day by this bit from Mr X's recent TEDx talk:
Graffiti Quilting- A fun free motion quilting design exercise.
Yoshiko Kurihara's quilt "Plumeria" was on display at the International Great Quilt Festival in Tokyo, Japan at the Tokyo Dome. "Plumeria" was part of the Invitational Flower Story Exhibit, the Bag Category, and Partnership Quilts.
Explore mealisab's 11054 photos on Flickr!
Free motion quilting design Graffiti quilting style
Helly My Quilting Friends! I have a terrific interview for you today with Karlee Porter, the creator of Graffiti Quilting. Click Here to find Karlee's website. I also have a super exciting announceme
Okay, technically my first post in this series was titled "5 Things I Learned While Grafitti Quilting," but then Yvonne (Quilting Jetgirl) had a discussion on her blog about what to call this style of quilting and in the course of that discussion a few of us started calling it flow quilting. It's the same style of quilting, but flow quilting describes it better, we feel. Over the course of 2 weeks, I spent about 30 hours flow quilting the negative space in this magazine project. I can't show you the whole thing yet, but the texture of the quilting is amazing! Here are the things I learned in those 30 hours of flow quilting. 1. Once you learn to quilt a design at a certain size, it's hard to quilt it bigger. Boy did I struggle with this one! Because I started doing free motion quilting without an extension table, I only had a small space in which to work. That meant I did all my designs very small and I have a hard time making them bigger. I started this quilt knowing there was a lot of negative space to fill in, so I kept telling myself 'large scale, large scale,' but I don't know that I actually succeeded 😊 In my defense, here's the scale I usually quilt, so I did manage to quilt somewhat bigger. I could certainly have gone bigger, though. This is detail from my X Marks the Spot quilt 2. Relax and figure out how to do fmq without tensing every muscle in your body. Spending two or more hours quilting every singe day meant that every bit of tension in my body became more and more noticeable as the days went on. When reading the comments on one of Christa Watson's posts recently, I saw that she said "I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to get an ergonomic setup for short people (like me) so the next best thing is to take lots of sewing breaks and stretch when needed" and I so agree! If you could see my setup, you would laugh. I have a box on the floor with books on it, trying to stop myself from twisting to keep my left (non-driving) foot on the floor, plus I sit on a book on my chair to raise me up high enough to be comfortable with the height of my sewing machine and extension table on the kitchen table. It's crazy! It kind of works, though, and I'm able to relax more than when I'm straining to reach. I still have to remind myself to relax as I seem to have a tendency to tense up, but I'm working on that. 3. Take breaks to walk around (see #2) Even with the best setup, and even if you remember not to tense up as you quilt, quilting is still a lot of strain on your muscles. It's a good idea to get up and walk around now and then to really relax and stretch. If you take breaks, you'll be able to quilt comfortably longer, which is definitely a good thing! 4. If you lose track of where you're going and quilt right through the middle of a pebble, no one will ever know. I know that I quilted right through the middle of at least one pebble, but no one will ever be able to find it...even me! There are probably thousands of pebbles in this throw quilt, so finding one that has a mistake would be impossible. Try your best to make each motif perfectly, but don't stress about little imperfections, especially when there are so many motifs in the whole quilt. 5. If you're flow quilting a large quilt, make sure you have lots of time and lots of thread. 30+ hours in a two week period (while also working full-time) meant I had to quilt every single night and even more on the weekends. Since I had a deadline, I worried a little about whether or not I'd have enough time to finish. If I'd had more time, or if I'd been able to quilt at a larger scale, I wouldn't have had to worry. As for the thread, I ordered two spools of Aurifil 2610 for the quilting and I'm so glad I did. Flow quilting really eats up the thread! I used about half of the second spool, which means I used roughly 2000m, or 2 km, of thread 😊 I'm always amazed when I think about the distance the thread I've used could cover! So that's what I've learned with my most recent flow quilting. Do you have any lessons you've learned while quilting? Add them in the comments below if you do 😊
Grafitti quilting is a style of free motion quilting where you take the different quilting designs you love and use them all, mixing them up and joining them together. I've admired the style for a long time, but I was intimidated by it, so I kept putting off trying it. This project seemed like the perfect one to finally give graffiti quilting a try. These blocks were made as tests to be sure my cutting directions were right for the blocks in my Friendship Galaxy baby quilt, and I have no plans for this quilt, so I figured if the quilting ruins it, it's no real loss. I don't think the quilting is ruining it, though! In fact, I really like it. I'm not quite halfway finished this mini quilt, but I thought I'd share a few things I've already learned about graffiti quilting. 1. Use a thread that doesn't blend. I've always tried to use a thread that blends with the fabric as much as possible because I wanted to hide all my mistakes. A few times with previous quilts, though, I've found it hard to keep track of where I've already quilted because the thread blended so well that I couldn't see the stitches. These background fabrics are grey and I'm using a lighter grey thread and I can see what I'm doing! I can't even imagine how hard this style would be if I couldn't see what I'd already quilted. Yes, you can see the imperfections, but I'm okay with that. 2. Bigger is better. The spaces around these double stars are pretty small, so I was trying to keep the scale of the quilting small too. I thought the whole graffiti style would be lost if I didn't squeeze a lot of designs into each space. It's hard to make the designs look neat at such a small scale, though. Once I moved out around the single star, where there's more room, I started making each design a little bigger and it is much easier to make them look neat. 3. Pebbles are a graffiti quilter's best friend. Pebbles fit anywhere! When I find myself in an awkwardly shaped space, I throw in a few pebbles to fill it up. When I don't know what to quilt next, I stitch a few more pebbles. When I want to move to the other side of a design I just finished...you guessed it, pebbles! 4. It's easier than it looks. I was intimidated by graffiti quilting because it looked complicated. It's not, though. It's just a matter of stitching one design a couple of times and then switching to something else. I pause a lot, look at what I've done and think about what I should do next. I turn the quilt a bit to allow myself to work from different angles to fill in those spaces. I'm still not comfortable with a lot of different designs, so there's a lot of repetition, but I think the graffiti style still comes through. 5. It's fun!! Need I say more? I'm sure I'll be using this style again. Have you tried graffiti quilting yet? Any lessons you've learned that you want to share? I'm linking up with Let's Bee Social, WIP Wednesday and NTT.
The last few weeks have been full with maximizing my time in the studio getting ready for show season. I received some constructive feedback from Quiltcon and am looking forward to implementing some
What's the new-news in the world of fabric? We went to the industry's top trade show, Quilt Market, and scoped it out. Let us share the beauty with you! Prepare to drool!Let's get to drooling
Whole cloth quilts, done in icy white or pale pastels, remind us of winter. We've never done a feature on whole cloth quilts, perhaps becau...
Consider These Points When Deciding on a Quilting Design! Have you ever finished up a quilt and been disappointed in how it feels and drapes? There’s a good chance that the density of the quilting was the problem. Quilting density, or how close together quilting lines are on a quilt, can have a big impact …
COVID 19 UPDATE: All 2020 and 2021 Classes have been CANCELED Keep you eye here or Sign up for my newsletter for updates when classes can safely resume. Below is a list of possible class offerings …
These quilt tattoo ideas are just as unique and intricate as the quilts they replicate. Check out our favorite designs and ideas.
Santa brought me a large pack of Inktense pencils by Derwent, so I decided to stitch a block design using my new IQ, and then paint it. This is a work in progress (WIP), but I thought I would shar…
Let’s blast back into the past to Day 200 when I created a texture called Microscopic World. What would happen...
I love the look of Flying Geese Quilts and here are 15 inspiration projects to get you making a flying geese quilt of your own!
It's week 2 of our free motion link party featuring McTavishing for the month of March. I hope everybody got to learn more about this versatile free motion quilting design and did some practicing on paper and then stitching on their machines! See week one of the free motion quilt-along, McTavishing Monday. Here's Karen with her daughter. Aren't they beautiful? If I'm not mistaken, since this picture was taken, she's had a son. Well, I know she's had a son, just not sure when this picture was taken, it's an older one. Chalk up another reason to like this lady, that baby is now a boy about the age of my oldest. Maybe we should start a club for women who are considered young quilters, but older moms of little kids. Karen's namesake design of McTavishing works great around applique and is wonderful for traditional designs. And also for more modern quilts. I love how she's changed up her usual McTavishing so that the lines accentuate the contours of the woman below, And the design can be more edgy and wild as used below in the zombie girl quilt below. Here's my new McTavishing practice piece, below, in progress. I started with one very curvy line that went all the way across this circle. Here's the circle all done. And a close up. And a video: The spools of Glide thread arrived from FilTec for our give-away. Glide is a thread that many aren't familiar with unless you are a longarmer. Their website is at Bobbin Central, named for their prewound bobbins. I admit to a bit of selfishness in wanting to try the thread first as it is new to me and yet, I want to share all 5 1000M spools with some of my wonderful readers. So....I....am going to use a little bit of each one for my McTavishing sampler I am doing for this quilt-along. I used the color, Cool Grey 3 for this center bit of stitching and it ran smooth as butter! I had to increase my top tension slightly as I was using Isacord in the bobbin and it was winning the typical tension tug-of-war as the Glide is a bit smoother thread. Not that I'm saying anything against either thread. Love them. But when you have two different threads in your machine, you will usually need to adjust your tension unless you have an automatic tensioning machine. Above is a close up shot of 3 similar threads I had on hand for comparison. It's not perfectly focused, but it's a fair shot. In case you can't tell, I like a little shine to my threads. Isacord has just enough shine for me, and this Glide has just a bit more. The Floriani has even more shine, but I've decided it has too much shine for most of my projects. That's ok, as it is primarily a thread for machine embroidery. The Glide has a very smooth twist too! Very nice thread, you're gonna love it. Have I mentioned it is an affordable thread? Very. I hope you've had a chance to do some McTavishing this week and are ready to link up your post featuring your work on this great design. Feel free to post a drawing if you are new to this design: drawing the design really helps! Post a sample piece or even a finished work. Treat last week as a base line and see if you've improved! This linky is no longer valid. Don't forget to bookmark this blog, follow, or sign it up in your favorite feed reader. Like the facebook page (I do post some short things on it pretty regularly), or even check out my Pinterest boards. I'll be visiting you too! This is being linked with Connie's Linky Tuesday.
