![]() I love the look cotton batting give my quilts, especially after the quilts are washed. What works for me might not work for you and there is no right or wrong way to quilt. ![]() Try my method to see if you like them but remember, machine quilting like hand quilting is a very personal technique. I learned something different from each teacher so I can't encourage you enough to take a few classes on machine quilting and then practice, practice, practice. I have taken classes from Lynda Howell from Stitch Connection, Sue Nickels, Beth Ann Williams and Nancy Roelfsema. How do you feel about swirls? Do you have a quilting motif that you just can’t seem to master? Tell me about it in the comments.I'll admit I'm not the best at machine quilting. ![]() I’m so glad to have this design in my repertoire! Who knows, maybe practicing this one will help my plain swirls over time as well. If I managed to come out of the “hook” part correctly, the motif was just about complete–and then on to the next one! I found the trouble shooting section useful here as well, because I had a tendency for all my “hooks” to line up, and trust me–you don’t want that! But once I had that down, it was a lot of fun! One thing that I found easier is that there was less “swirl” in this design. ![]() For me the hardest part is remembering which way to come back up after I create the hook. However, Swirl Hooks turned out to be my dark horse favorite! They were tricky to figure out at first, and I followed the drawings in the book step-by-step until I had it figured out. I confess that I was dreading this design. Swirls will never be my favorite motif by themselves, but I can see mixing them into an improv quilting design–so I will keep practicing them. I have this problem and reading that section was helpful. And she tackles common issues, like not finishing the swirls, and how if you aren’t careful, then tend to stack on you, which is not as pleasing as a more random placement. The book does a beautiful job of not only showing how to make a swirl, but how to build them into an all-over meander. I have finally figured out how to use the width of my open-toe free-motion foot to help me gauge a consistent space, but I’m still not really happy. It’s a bit of a revelation to me actually, to figure this out. I’m fully focused and (somewhat) relaxed and I’m swirling away when about four swirls in, I start to get a little bored, so I ever-so-slightly start to speed up and things quickly get sloppy (as you can see in the photo above). And texture hides a multitude of quilting missteps.īut that consistent spacing is my problem. This consistency becomes texture in an overall quilt design. The number one tip that I have heard from Angela Walters on quilting swirls (and quilting in general) is to keep the spaces between the lines consistent. But they just don’t get any easier for me. I practiced on paper, and this is not my first time around the block with swirls. Angela does a wonderful job of showing you how to form them in a very step-by-step way. And they are deceptively hard! Let’s back up here. This week we are tackling Swirls and Swirl Hooks. I am finding that even 15 minutes really builds skill, and let’s face it, it often ends up being quite a bit more than 15 minutes once I get going. We would love it if you grabbed a copy of the book and spent just 15 minutes a day building up your free motion quilting skills. Here we are on week 2 of the Free Motion Meandering blog hop with fellow quilters and bloggers Jen and Vicki.
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