Planning My Free Motion Quilting

I’ve been having a play with my sketchbook this week, thinking about what kind of free motion quilting designs I want to use to fill in my Swarm quilt. I’ve been rewatching the range of free motion quilting classes on Craftsy that I’ve signed up for over the past 2 years, and gathering some ideas. When I thought I’d finished the quilt, it looked like this.

I have swirled the butterfly “trails”, and then filled in the rest with diagonal lines to keep drawing the eye up the quilt. I want to fill in those diagonal lines with a range of designs that compliment the butterflies, and yet also provide some contrast. My current thinking is to alternate straight designs with more swirly designs, maybe starting with one of my favourite designs – chains of swirly loops. I tried doing two sides of swirls, or alternating sides, I like them both so I don’t know which one I’ll end up doing… maybe both!

Then there’s some zig zag action with some pebbles. That one will probably end up being on a smaller border, because I don’t want to do too many pebbles – I love them but oh boy they’re hard work!I’m going to try and do my first proper feather… you can see from my sketch I need to practice! With the patchwork background, I can use the seams to guide an orange peel design. I’ve done that before on my Totoro quilt and I loved the effect! There’s also the option to do some diamonds, although that sketch ended up a little bit to art deco-ey to me, which I don’t really like (don’t hate me). I’m going to keep brainstorming so I can procrastinate to committing to thread, eep!

*I’m a Craftsy affiliate because these classes are so helpful!