Hello Friends! As promised, here is my tutorial for my “Riley Blake”-ish flower motif from yesterday’s post. In order to quilt this motif, you will need a marking pen and something that will allow you to draw a circle, besides your usual free-motion quilting notions.
Here goes the tutorial. First I used my marking pen to draw a circle that serves as a boundary for my flower. Then, I just eyeballed and drew a much smaller circle in the center of the large circle.
Then, I started by quilting the small circle, following (sort of) the drawn outline, before finishing off with a small swirl within the small circle. And after that I started my first swirl in the big circle.
Easy peasy – I just kept swirling within that drawn boundary, until I came to the very last swirl…. at this point, I didn’t complete my swirl as you can see from the picture.
This is because at this point, my swirls look more like an octopus’ tentacles rather than a flower. So, to transform the tentacles into a flower, I needed to “close off” those swirls by doing some echo quilting.
I like that this motif is very forgiving. The swirls do not all have to be identical to look good, and the echoes do not have to be exactly spaced. And I can also challenge myself further in the precision department by quilting the swirls and echoes perfectly to see how far I can push myself. I hope you will give this motif a try, and let me know how you like it. Since this is a new motif for me, I have ideas swimming in my head on how to further develop the applications of the motif… but only after I have met some of my immediate deadlines that includes playing with some REAL Riley Blake fabrics!
Thank you for stopping by, and Happy Quilting!
p.s. For my new friends and followers, click on the feather quilting image at the top of this post for more free-motion quilting tips!
Ivory Spring 