I am sharing with you today how I quilted block 9 – Wedding Ring.

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!

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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.

Allover Quilting Motif: Woodgrain

For the allover quilting, I chose to do the woodgrain motif.

Woodgrain motif is fairly simple motif, mostly organic wavy vertical lines across the quilt. I love this motif for a small quilt or small area, and I am yet to try it with larger quilt someday.

To add features to the woodgrain motif, spiral knots are added in here and there in random places to fill up areas and to bring more life to the quilt motif. If you would like to try this motif, I have a simple tutorial here for you.

How to free motion quilt woodgrain motif

You will need:

Pen and Paper
Free motion quilting foot. Read here for more detail info which foot is best.
A good thread. I use Superior Threads for all of my quilting
The right needle. I suggest using top stitch needle as it has a larger eye to avoid wearing off your thread.

Start with a wavy line as far as you like – it doesn’t have to be all the way down to the other side of the quilt (especially if you are quilting large quilt). For this quilt block, since it is fairly small, all of my lines are from one edge to another.
Echo back about a quarter inch from the first wavy line all the way back and begin to create the first knot by making a hook away from the wavy line.
Fill in the hook with spiral hooks coming back out to echo the rest of the wavy line down and back up echoing around the knot.
Keep going by echoing the lines and create another knot to balance the first knot.
Fill up areas with just echoes to avoid too many knot shapes.
repeat echoes. and create a half knot in edges area by simple echoing in v-shape as in figure 6.
continue the pattern and if required, move on to the next area to fill in.

I do suggest you try this pattern with pen and paper first. This will give you the idea on how the final look will be, how you are to navigate from one place to another, and how the motion is.

After having the confidence practicing on paper, you can move onto free motion quilting on scrap fabric basted with leftover batting. This is to ensure you have good tension and have a good sense of moving your quilt in the direction you want it to go. Then you can move onto quilting your block.

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!

I planned the custom quilting using Sharon Holland’s colouring page which Sharon Holland and Maureen Cracknell have available for download in the Intro section. I simply view them in magnified mode on my screen and crop each block into JPG on its own (You can use (shift+command+4 on Mac) or use snips in Microsoft.

Then, I printed the block individually and plan out the quilting with pencils. While doing it with the pencil I also plan how will I be moving the needle from one place to another.

No marking Custom Quilting

For this block, I did not do any markings prior to quilting.

I basically have something in mind on how I would quilt it, sketch them on the printed block and went straight to the machine.

I use a lot of dot-to-dot quilting in this block. In the centre and the yellow rectangles.

For the centre, orange peel again, making a small cathedral window effect. I added some pearls in between echoed lines to bring more details.

To continue with the feather theme I have with all of these custom quilted blocks, I added circular feather around the centre square. I am falling in love with feathers around a curved line. Especially if they go all the way around completing the whole round.

As for the half square triangle corners, I decided to keep it simple and make the printed fabric pop even more by dense matchstick quilting the solid background fabric.

Since I will be piecing these blocks together, I decided to make the points of the triangles in the yellow rectangle about 1/4 inch away from the edge. This way, my points are still going to be there once the blocks are sewn together later when putting the quilt together. I just eyeball this, if you are not confident with eyeballing, you can go ahead and do some marking.

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!

NOTE : I no longer promote Craftsy/Bluprint as I used to due to the way the subscription is currently being carried out. I had the issue of cancelling my subscription when the company changed hand and I find that cancelling through calls is inconvenient. However, I do still stand behind these classes I promote and if you are subscribed, you can surely check these classes I recommend on the platform. If you are looking for another online platform to learn craft such as quilting, do check out CreativeBug. It is much cheaper in subscription (subscribe now 3 months for only $5). Thank you.

For more dot-to-dot quilting ideas, I highly recommend this Craftsy Class!