Free Motion Friday - Judy's Quilt

It's Friday, which means... FREE MOTION FRIDAY! I had a lot of fun last week, and got some good feedback on it, so here we go again. I was super excited when Judy sent me this quilt to be part of Free Motion Friday.

She says:

I just saw you were doing this and I would LOVE to see how you would quilt the attached quilt! I have finished this one but had so much fun making it am contemplating (seriously) making another :) I don't know if this happens to you but as I was quilting (and totally committed as I was NOT going to rip for hours) I thought of several different ways I could have gone. I'm happy with the quilt but would be very interested in how you would quilt all of that negative space :)

I have to say I love this quilt! This is how Judy ended up quilting hers:

In real life I think I might have done something fairly similar to Judy -- I love the ghost shapes that she has put in there, and I likely would have done something similar. However, since we want some new idea's, this is what I came up with.

So... here we go..

I started by echoing the flying geese out into the negative space.

I would start by marking out the flying geese across the quilt, making each goose the same size as the pieced ones. I would then stitch out each of these geese before filling them with a dot to dot quilting design:

The black line is the stitched out goose, then I mark two points 1" and 2" down from the point, and stitch the red and orange lines so the point is on this marking. Sometimes I do this marking, sometimes I don't, depending on how uniform I want each point to be.  I might also go back and fill in the bottom triangle to give more definition to my straight lines.

After I was done my row of geese, I would go back and echo around my row of geese, again, so they "pop" nicely, then fill in the spaces with a straight line or loopy quilting.

I did similar geese on my Vicki's Socks Batik Version.

A little different -- I went for wonky geese, and no echoing or filling as they are smaller geese. But you can see the loopy fill I used to make sure those geese popped. If I'm going to go to that much work, I want them to show up.

In the darker grey background I went with straight, diagonal lines. I thought that this would emphasize that darker grey strip, and add a little movement -- really show that that darker grey line is going diagonally all the way through the quilt.

In the block piecing I did some dot to dot quilting, and in the pink geese, continued my flying geese from the negative space.

I then echo quilted in the negative space around what I had already quilted -- the flying geese and the blocks. I did three rows of this negative space, and then filled the middle row with some bubbles. The quilting diagram shows scribble in the rest of the negative spaces,  but in real life I would quilt this with whatever filler I happened to feel like at the moment. I might even have ended up doing each of the four spaces with a different fill pattern.

And so that's Judy's Quilt! You can check out more pictures of her quilt on her blog HERE.

Remember, if you want your quilt to be part of Free Motion Friday, email me at kathleen (at) kathleenquilts.com

Later days,

Kathleen.