I am sharing with you today how I quilted block 15 – Broken Dishes.
If you are new here, this post is a part of my quilt-as-you-go my Sewcial Bee Sampler, a sew-along hosted by Sharon Holland and Maureen Cracknell. I plan to share along the process with some tips and tutorial.
As usual, I have two blocks made for two quilts, one with custom quilting and one with allover quilting. Both would be a great practice if you are looking towards improving your free-motion skill. I am still practicing myself, especially with the custom quilting. I am learning as I go, so let’s do this together!
Some links provided here are affiliate links for your convenience. Please find my full disclosure here.
Quilt as you go
Quilt as you go block-by-block is one method you could opt for when you want to make quilting large quilts on your domestic machine feasible. It is one of my go-to methods especially if I want to skip the heavy work pushing through large quilts within my machine throat space.
Besides, I love the fact that I can easily finish blocks by blocks and even have a fancy backing like this one I made earlier. If you are interested to learn how I piece the block together, here is one way how to do it – using small sashing strips.
Spray Basting Quilt Sandwiches
In order to quilt-as-you-go block-by-block, I first made each block into a quilt sandwich, basting with Spray Baste adhesive. I love spray basting as it removes the need to undo pins as you quilt especially for small blocks like these.
You can choose to use the same fabrics for the backing, however, I decided to do mine scrappy solid for the allover quilting quilt and scrappy printed for the custom quilt. The scrappy solid backing will look something like this one I made earlier.
I recommend having about 2-3″ wider batting and backing to make it easier to quilt the area around the edges of the block. I made mine kind of tight, and I find that it is hard to move the quilt with so little to hold on to when the quilting gets so close to the edge. Well, lesson learned.
Allover Quilting Motif: Square Loops
For the allover quilting, I repeated a previous one. I actually have forgotten that I have done this motif before for this quilt.
You can tell now that it is one of my favorite motifs.
If I want something easy and fast besides the simple loop, this is my choice.
It gives a different texture than the regular loopy loops.
It adds a geometric look to the quilting piece.
[Related: How to Quilt Square Loops]
Anyway, since I have already made this motif as a tutorial here, I’ll add a doodle practice sheet instead. So if you want to practice your muscle memory to be able to quilt this motif, do it with a pencil and paper first. You can practice with the free doodle sheet below.
FREE doodle practice sheet for free motion quilting Square Loops
make sure you pin this to try them later!
Custom free motion quilting on quilt-as-you-go blocks
For the other quilt, each block is going to be custom quilted, which means each will be designed accordingly with the block pattern.
The benefit of using quilt-as-you-go block is that it is so much easy to maneuver with small blocks and custom quilting is made easier under the throat of a domestic machine. Plus, your shoulder should thank you too!
Custom Free Motion Quilting
I quilted an orange peel for the center and just a simle pebbling to fill in the areas around it. The block has a large frame border and I decided to emphasize that more with a feather border.
Feather quilting
If you have been following the updates on this version of my Sewcial Bee Sampler, you’ll notice the feather motif quilting theme that I try to implement in each block.
For this block,I have incorporated another feather border. This time trying to avoid lots of backtracking on similar lines by creating a double echo look for each feather petals.
The border of this block now looks puffy and seems like the little block inside is like surrounded by clouds.
I enjoyed testing out this feather style, although I think I can do a little better with the curves of the feathers. It is all with practice!
Well, that is all for this block, I have 6 more to go and then I’ll be wrapping this quilt making by joining them together.
If you want to try free motion quilt feather motifs yourself, I have a free course that you can sign up right here to get started.
Well, if you decide to join along or have any questions, drop me a comment. I will be happy to help where I can! In the meantime, you can also check these free motion quilting tips!
Click here to related Archive posts.
until next time, have fun sewing and quilting!
2 Comments
i really lie your posts. Would like to ask a question.
Do I really need to have a non slip mat to do free motion? And which one do you reccomend?
Thanks!!
Hi Marilene. I would say you do not have to have the non slip mat for free motion. You can totally do it without the non slip mat. I would recommend using glove though if you do not have the slip mat – regular gardening glove with sticky dots (rubber painted dots) would be sufficient.
However, the slip mat will help reduce the friction and will help guide free motion much smoother – I talked about the non slip mat here on this post. I highly recommend Supreme Slider as that is what I am using. Hope that helps!