Free Motion Friday - Susan's Tessellation Quilt

Friday!!!!

Today we have Susan's Tessellation quilt.

She says:

This is the Tessellation pattern by Nydia Kehnle & Alison Glass and I have been working on it as part of the #tessellationsal with Sara Lawson at Sew Sweetness.  I'm busy quilting it to death now with straight-ish lines in various directions but would be really curious to see how you would fmq it.  Also would like to know what colour(s) of thread you would choose.

So here we go!

I started by doing some dot-to-dot quilting in all the solid blocks.

Next up, some straight lines around the (off) center star. 

Then some more straight lines, filled with some pebbles.

More straight lines in the center star, filled with some straight line quilting. Some straight lines in the star points, and some dot to dot quilting in center of the star.

Then, yet more straight lines (in the ditch this time) to emphasise the star. I filled the middle of the 3 colours with the center, and left the middle triangles without quilting- they will puff up a bit, and again help to emphasize this center part. here is the center star all quilted.

Then, to finish things up.

I went back and did more straight line quilting, along with some random blocks with something different in them just to keep myself from getting too bored.

You might ask " Kathleen, why didn't you just do all the straight lines at once. Why did you have us do the solid blocks first, then the center, then the rest of the blocks?'... and the answer to that is because I don't always have a plan when I start. I just start quilting and see where it goes. I didn't know when I started that I was going to go back and add straight lines to the rest of the block too, and I was too lazy to go back and re-draw once  I had the plan. So you get the weird steps.

One thing to watch out for when doing the straight lines, is that I try not to have points meeting eachother at the same place for example:

Where the red circle is, you can see a bunch of points all coming together in the same place. I want to avoid this as much as possible, because that can cause your quilt to not lay flat after it is quilted. Which you don't want.

As for thread colour... depending on how much work I wanted to do, probably I would have changed thread with each block to match the block I was quilting. If I was feeling lazy, I probably would have gone with a darkish-golden-yellow, as I find in bright quilts that tends to blend in with everything.

Susan finished quilting her quilt though! Not my way but:

Tessellation ... Finished quilting it tonight. Quilted lines are about half an inch apart. Love the texture the straight lines create. Hate how long it takes.

That's about it! Remember, if you want to let me play with your quilt (oh please please please!) email a picture to kathleen(at)kathleenquilts.com

Later days! Kathleen.