As I mentioned last week, I have stopped trying to keep up with Angela Walters in her newest challenge…. “Free Motion Fillers”. She has been FLYING thru the designs this time and it was simply too much to try to do all of them in one week. Fortunately, all of the videos are on her website so I can go back to them at any time!!
This week I have continued to work on the “Geometric” FMQ designs and found one or two that did NOT tickle my fancy, but found several that are definitely keepers!!
The first one for this week was “Merged Lines”. This is a design that I have seen Angela talk about and it always looked super complicated.
Initially I had trouble figuring the pattern out and literally followed Angela’s steps one at a time. I would watch 15 seconds of the video and then quilt it the same way….watch another 15 seconds and then quilt…….another 15 seconds and then quilt!!
At some point, I had the AHA moment where I understood the design.
Don’t you love it when that happens!!
Also, I was trying to quilt it side to side, but when I switched to a vertical orientation it worked so much better!
Here are the steps…..
Quilt a line that follows one of the edges and then have it veer off at some point…..
This veering leaves an area that you are now going to fill with lines that echo the line that you just quilted……
When you hit a previous line, you simply travel along that line and then repeat the echo until the entire area is filled in……
You then travel outside of the furthest line that you have quilted and start the process over again!!
I can see using this design when I have large areas to cover. I stitched my section at 1/4″ so there is a LOT of quilting in it, but you could easily open it up more and get thru an area pretty fast.
Here is the final……
I LOVE IT!!!!
In this section of the challenge there are TEN different designs to try but Angela only demonstrates seven of them. The other three are in her pdf handout but there is no actual instruction.
At first this frustrated me and I was really concerned about trying designs that I couldn’t see in action.
BUT, as I got to those designs, I found that they were simply variations of one of the other designs and that I could probably figure them out if I tried!!!
The first one was “Blended Lines” and I could see that it was going to work a lot like the “Merged Lines” that I just showed.
After thinking about the design a bit, I stitched my first line from one side to the other, traveled just a bit back over my stitching, and then veered out to one side……
I traveled a bit past the veered line and stitched another line all the way across. This time I traveled a bit further on the line and then veered again. I also had the option to veer BACK to the line before I reached the other side.
The only problem that I hit was that I SHOULD have started the design at one corner and had it flow all the way across the diamond. Instead, I started right in the middle and had to break thread and then work on the other side. This meant that my straight line had to be further away…..
……so that I had a place to insert my “veered” line…..
This is how it looked……
Both of these designs are DEFINITELY in my “use again” folder!!!
Come back tomorrow and I will present two more favorites and two that I will probably NEVER use!!
Are you in a rut with your machine quilting? Sure, you know HOW to do FMQ and you have 4 or 5 patterns that you do well. BUT, you are bored with those designs and need a push to try some new things. If so, please join “MOVE-IT…. a Free-Motion Quilting Boot Camp”!! I will take you on a FREE 10-week journey to learn new designs and become more comfortable with just MOVING IT!! You can sign up by clicking HERE.