Deciding what to quilt, a new weekly series!

Probably the question that I get asked to most often is, “How do you decide what quilting designs to use on a quilt?”. There are so many factors that play into my decision making progress. Some of the things I ask myself are:

What does the piecer want?

Is there an area on the quilt that I want to highlight or play up?

Just like putting on makeup, there isn’t just one way to quilt a quilt. You may want the toned down version or you may want the glammed up version. Quilting, like any other art, is so subjective. I am starting a weekly series on my blog that will give you tips and ideas on how to pick out quilting designs for your quilt. It’s going to be fun, relaxed and (hopefully) informative! If you have any questions or quilt tops that you would like me to address, please send me an email at angelawaltersquilting@gmail.com or comment on this post.

So today, I am going to highlight a  quilt that I just finished for Heather, a fun and bright spiderweb quilt.

Quilting inside the blocks was easy enough, I went with a simple flower-type design. The idea was to not quilt anything to intensive or dense, since it wouldn’t be seen anyway. But I was stumped just for a bit on how to quilt the space around the blocks. I wanted something interesting, but not too distracting. So I left areas unquilted to give the look of a lattice behind the blocks. This is one of the easiest techniques, since you are quilting less, but still gettign a great visual impact!

I didn’t even need to mark the quilt, I used the seams in between the blocks as a guide, quilting a 1/4” from each side of the seam.

Back view of the quilt:

So the next time you are trying to decide what to quilt on your quilt, consider leaving certain areas unquilted. Heather will be putting more pictures of her quilt on her blog later on this week so be sure to check them out!

I will continue this series next Monday with a new post, so make sure to send any questions this week.

Happy Quilting!