How to Quilt Patchwork Quilts

Recently I was emailed by a wonderful woman named Guilitta from Germany.

Guilitta sent me a photo of a quilt designed by Bonnie Hunter who lives here in North Carolina!

I just think it's so cool that this project is not only connecting quilters from all over the world, but also locally within my home state.

It just goes to show that you never know who you're going to get an email from these days!

I'm super excited about helping Guilitta with some possible quilting designs for this quilt because I've been a fan of Bonnie Hunter's super-awesome quilting website for quite some time.

Just in case you've never heard of her, Bonnie is the creator of Quiltville.com where you can find piecing tutorials on every scrappy quilt known to quiltkind.

Like me, Bonnie posts almost all of her information for free so don't hesitate to head over and check out her awesome info and her book Scraps and Shirttails!

Guilitta pieced Bonnie's Leaders and Enders quilt, which was featured in a recent issue of Quiltmaker Magazine. This quilt is also being published in Bonnie's new book, Adventures with Leaders & Enders, due for release in Feb 2010 by Kansas City Star.

Based on Bonnie's instructions, I think this is one of those quilts that LOOKS hard to piece, but actually is super easy.

So, big question of the day:
how the heck to you quilt a quilt like this?

This is definitely a quilt where Shape has total dominance. Yes, Color is also playing a pretty big role in this quilt, but really it's the hundreds of small pieces that your eye really catches at first glance.

With such a dominance of shape and color, texture (your quilting stitches) really needs to take on the role of supporting actor.

This is one of the ONLY situations where stitching in the ditch is perfectly fine because you're quilting isn't likely to show up very much, no matter what you do.

So that's design suggestion #1 - just quilt it in the ditch (I know, it hurts to suggest it).

But what if you didn't like stitching in the ditch had no desire to stitch ALL of those ditches?

Then I'd try the next design:

This design draws focus to the square shapes created within the piecing, making the quilt almost feel like a square within a square design.

You can stitch these lines in the ditch or quilt them slightly off center so you don't have to quilt it quite so carefully (ditch quilting can take FOREVER if you're doing it right).

On to suggestion number 3! Let's change things up a bit and see this quilt with quilting lines that totally ignore the piecing:

This definitely creates a different look. Keep in mind that even if your quilt top is busy, you can always back the quilt with a plain backing fabric so your quilting stitches can show off to the back instead.

And what if you were totally sick of straight lines and wanted something really different for your quilt?

Try circles! Here's design suggestion #4:

And of course to show you just how versitile all of these designs are, here's design #5:

Yes, those are supposed to look like feathers (I'm still not good at drawing with a mouse).

You can take ANY of the designs I've suggested, even stitching in the ditch, and fill the areas with any of the fillers from this project.

Design #5 is based on the same idea as Design #2 where you are stitching in the ditch over certain lines to draw more attention to them.

By adding the feathers within the lined areas, you're creating even more focus to those areas. This would be a design that would do very nicely in a local quilt show, but also be open enough to still be comfortable on a bed.

That's it for Guilitta's patchwork quilt! I decided to post this all in one go today because she said the quilt is for her daughter's wedding. What a beautiful gift!

Special thanks to Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.com for providing such an excellent resource to quilters all over the world!

Now let's go quilt!

Leah Day