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Elements Of Your Quilting Design

You can transform your quilt from the Plain-Jane to an Exciting Quilt with simple elements of design in your quilting design. Although books are becoming better concerning this, often a book demonstrating a good looking quilt top design fails to get results when it comes to suggesting quilting designs.

Many of the books have small pictures of the whole finished quilt top, leaving you guessing how it was quilted. Others have close up pictures of the quilting desi gn for part of the quilt top, along with show how that part connects with the rest of the top.

Effective quilting designs won't need to be intricate and detailed to be effective. A quilter might choose a pattern that merely echoes the pieced or appliqué design, outlines someone design feature, or creates a grid or series of parallel quilting lines.

In deciding how to quilt your quilt, you need to first look at some of the overall design elements of the quilt top, and ask some basic questions, like: Are available design features I would like to emphasize? Are there elements I must have recede to the background? Are there large, open areas where a quilted design, such as a feathered wreath, could be effective? Does the quilt have movement that I want to enhance (i.e. are available curves and waves vs. straight seams)? Is there interesting fabric I must highlight or create a contrast

Once you have some of those questions answered, it's time to look at some specifics.

A quilting design that echoes principle design of the quilt is just about the easiest to perform, yet choosing which design elements of your quilt you echo can, indeed, affect the overall look of your quilt.

For example, if you take an easy Irish Chain quilt, by quilting parallel lines of quilting through the diagonal lines of squares creates a kind of channel affect, making the center squares stand out. The square in the center might be quilting in a very different way, creating a new design element.

If your quilt is green and white, how about quilting a shamrock in each square? Quilting a heart in each square delivers yet a different message. Or, mix them up, a shamrock in every other square, alternating using a heart.

Another method of enhancing the pieced pattern of the quilt would be to quilt additional shapes of the main design. For example, you can turn an eight pointed star right into a 16 pointed star by simply quilting points in the background between each with the 8 pieced points. By varying the size of the quilted points, you can provide the star even more dimension and interest.

Quilting designs in large and open areas may be used to repeat curves or angles appearing somewhere else on the quilt.

Going back to our Irish Chain, you might carry the shamrocks or hearts to the border by quilting them in one of the borders.

Over a quilt using plaid fabric, you can create a plaid design with your quilting stitches, even in areas where you have placed solid fabric.

Although some quilters may advise you differently, there are really very few rules when it comes to designing the quilting pattern to your top. However, understanding several things about quilting does help.

Quilting in the ditch anchors and sharpens the seam line therefore the seam looks as straight as it did when the top was pressed. In the ditch stitches also result in the adjacent pieces to puff up.

As your quilting stitches cause the fabric to recede, a line of quilting can create the illusion of a seam where there is none.

Quilting across a seam line distorts that seam line and could soften the contrast between two pieces, thus easing the transition between areas on your top.

Quilting by way of a fabric design will distort the design. If the fabric design element is something you want to keep, consider quilting around it. One example is, if your fabric has flowers, then quilting around the outside of the flowers will make them puff up in your quilt top. Adding more background quilting - be it stippling or quilting a grid - will make the flowers puff up a lot more.

The good news / bad news about quilting designs is the fact that there are really no rules - only things that happen when you put quilting stitches as part of your quilt. Therefore, designing your quilting pattern, just like designing your quilt top, is very much a concern of personal taste and your idea of your final quilt.

So, take those unfinished quilts from the closet, and plan a quilting design, realizing that it can't be wrong! And that however it is quilting, it is better to get the quilt being used on a couch or bed or viewed hanging on a wall than it is to have it hiding within your closet.









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