This week is the chapter called Exploding Star in the book “The Ultimate Guide to Machine Quilting” by Angela Walters and Christa Watson. HollyAnne, Kristin and Jen are joining me in this journey. The four of us are blogging our way through the book and each week that goes by we are practicing more and gaining confidence with each exercise. I am a long armer and the other ladies are using their domestic sewing machines. The patterns for the quilts in the book are amazing but we are focusing on the free motion quilting for the blog hop. Links to the previous weeks are on the side bar tab for the Machine Quilting Blog hop. Join the party at Instagram using hashtag #machinequiltingbloghop

Christa’s spirals are not something that you can do on a longarm— the continuous spiral pattern over an entire quilt. Angela’s take on this chapter is about quilting with using free motion stitches and using scale to make stitches. She talks alot about using items to keep the stitch motif to stay the same size throughout the quilt. Think of an item that would be about the size you want to make motif or stitch–penny, nickel, quarter. You can can see in the “o” block the back ground is a tight swirl. The Blue fabrics have a small paisley.

She then talks about changing the scale for emphasis— smaller denser scale bring more emphasis. As well as  echoing and outlining areas. In this quilt, the background has a denser stitch of leaves and loops. The leaves have ruler work straight lines.

In this quilt, I used different sized stitches for each area and you can see the different areas that show more emphasis due to the density and size of the quilting stitches.

The final quilt shows examples of most of the concepts we have talked about in this book… different sized stitches, different types of density and different stitches in different parts of the quilt.

Can you see all the different takes on some of the basic stitches? swirls, pebbling, switchbacks, lines and paisleys? Do you see the echoing and changing of scales. Enlarge the pictures to see the details.

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Vicki

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Watch the blogs for the full details on our giveaway coming up!!!!