Thursday, May 31, 2012

2012 Free Motion Quilt Challenge - May


This month's tutorial comes from Leah Day of The Free Motion Quilting Project. Leah has an amazing amount of information on her website. All of her free motion quilt designs have video tutorials and she has a wonderful program, the Free Motion Quilt Along with weekly lessons to help you improve your free motion skills.

For the Free-Motion Quilting Challenge this month, Leah chose two foundational designs for us to practice. The first one is called Double Stippling. To make this design you stitch over your design area using a very large scale stipple. Then you stitch over your design with a smaller scale stipple making sure to fill all the spaces. 


The second design is called Railroad Tracks. Like the first design you start by stitching a large scale stipple. Instead of wiggling back and forth over your wavy line, you use just straight lines and sharp angles creating what looks like railroad tracks. This was a much more difficult design to stitch. Not all my lines are straight and not all my angles are sharp. It took a lot more effort to think ahead so that the spacing would be consistent and all the areas would be filled in. But with each practice it got better. I think this design would be so cute on a little boy's quilt. 


I can't wait to see what next month's tutorial will be!