The Free Motion Quilting Project: Day 352

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Day 352 - Woven Flower

Last spring I spent a few weeks playing with center filled flower designs and put several together in this Flower Bouquet Quilt:

One of the flowers designed for this little quilt was this Woven Flower:

This design is actually quite simple: start with a basic version of Paisley Flower, then go inside the main petals and stitch interlocking lines so they appear to have a woven texture.

It's quite a nice variation that might be even more fun to play with using multiple colors of thread. Stitch the base of the flower with one color, then stitch the woven lines with another color.

For some reason YouTube decided that it absolutely didn't want to upload my video of Woven Flower yesterday and today I can't find it anywhere. Grrr.... It will be up, as soon as I can find it and beat YouTube into uploading it once and for all!

Difficulty Level - Beginner / Intermediate. For practice with this design, first try a simple, open flower version (with no extra woven lines). When you get the hang of that, the only extra step is to stitch inside each petal with more lines. Easy peasy!

Filler Design Type - Center Fill. This group of designs work very differently from most of the other fillers on the site. Instead of working in logical rows to fill a space (hence the name "filler"), Center Fill designs instead start in the center and radiate out. Of course they can fill an entire space, but it's always going to work in a circular way. This explains why it's so very easy to create pretty flowers with center filled designs!

Directional Texture - Center Focused. Because you're working from the center, in a circular fashion, you're always going to have a center focused texture that will draw your eye to wherever the flower starts on your quilt.

Suggestions for Use - Personally I'm intrigued as to what a large, open, quilt would look like quilted only with large, open flowers. This is yet another idea that seems to fit into the modern quilting movement so I'll definitely give it a try next year.

Back of Woven Flower