Creating a Quilting Design - Tutorial

This is a close up of the fabric in Bronwyn’s quilt which I showed in my last post.

I used this fabric as inspiration for the quilting design in the setting triangles of this quilt.  You can see there is a mixture of flowers, swirls, leaves and paisley shapes.

I started by sketching some ideas that came to me from looking at this fabric.

Then I incorporated them into a triangle shape – a few pages of sketches were discarded before getting to this stage.

When I found something I liked, I was ready to load the quilt.  I marked the shapes and basic lines with chalk to see if I liked how it would fit into the area I was working with.

Once satisfied, I took a deep breath and started quilting.

It was a little intimidating to work with such a high contrasting thread as it shows every little wobble.  Once I got started though, it was a lot easier than I thought.  I even found that one line of stitching was not strong enough, so in some places I went over the stitching line twice to make it stand out even more.