Free Motion Friday

I was at our Staff quilting retreat a couple weekends ago, and Liz made this delightful quilt.

Then she asked the innocent question "How should I quilt it?" Which is pretty much my favourite question. So I got all excited, got out my iPad and drew out a bunch of quilting designs for her. And she was pretty excited, and I had a lot of fun, so I thought that I should do it more often. So every (or almost every) Friday, I'm having "Free Motion Friday" where I'll talk about some quilting stuff, mainly some different idea's and tip for quilting various quilts.

So here we go! Liz's Quilt.

Liz really wanted to emphasize the diamond shape of her quilt, and so we thought that the quilting would help with this. That is why we I put the ribbon candy pushing through the diamond, not breaking for the colour changes, just having it go through the light diamond.

The nice thing about ribbon candy is that it is super easy, and versatile. We started with a straight line down the diagonal on both sides about 1/4 - 1/2 an inch in from the edges, to further separate this section and make it pop. Then we filled between the lines with ribbon candy.

The nice thing about ribbon candy, is once you get the rhythm of it, you can do it almost in you sleep. I tend to over-use ribbon candy. Any time I have a long thing area to fill, ribbon candy it is. And then more ribbon candy, and more ribbon candy. Mad love for this design, I'm telling you.

To continue the look of the diamonds, in the dark blocks we put some dot-to-dot quilting filled with ribbon candy.

I started with the blue line, then the purple, then the orange. I start with the blue right in one corner, draw a straight line to about 1 in from the next corner, then right to the 2nd corner, then 1 inch in again, and back to the first corner. Then the same thing with the purple line, this time going 1" in from the blue line. Then I filled in the purple line with RIBBON CANDY!

The last sections are the light triangles. I filled them with what I call my "art deco" corner.

This is another one of my favorite. I used it for the first time on my swoon quilt, and have used it quite a few times since.

And that's Liz's quilt. All the individual components are nice and easy, but when combined together make a stunning quilt! I can't wait to see her quilt finished.

Want your quilt to be part of Free Motion Friday? Email a picture of your quilt to kathleen(at)kathleenquilts.com.

See you next week! Later days,

Kathleen.