Quilting Design #13 – Wandering Clover
For our 13th free motion quilting design, I’ve decided to mix things up a bit. If you haven’t noticed already, I rarely create free motion designs where the lines of quilting cross. I’m not a fan of flowery shapes particularly, so I decided to test my limits by quilting this Wandering Clover design:
My personal opinion is that a filler should fill a space and add some texture and interest, but not draw so much attention that it competes with the major design elements within the quilt.
But I’m finding that really any filler design, even a Cat Hairball filler, can be used just about anywhere without being distracting so long as you use threads that match with your fabric color.
So this means that the real determinate of eye distraction is color, not texture!
Learn more about quilting Wandering Clover
Inspiration: With this filler I just sat at my sewing machine and started stitching. I really had no thought in my head at all, but after the three petals formed, I thought “Oh, clover! Cool!” and just kept on quilting.
Technically this filer doesn’t look anything like clover as you can see from this picture:
But what plant has three leaves and twists like a vine? Poison Oak. Sorry, but I prefer to think of this as clover because at least I’m not horribly allergic to it!
Difficulty Level – Beginner. The one thing I can say for this filler is it hides its mistakes. Don’t worry about every leaf being perfect or the line wandering just so. The texture blends itself very nicely so you can hide your mistakes so long as you keep moving evenly.
Design Family – Independent.
Directional Texture – No Directions. This is what I call a flat filler, or background fill. It’s perfect for small tight areas that just need the piss stitched out of them, but no extra directional texture.
Suggestions for Use – Background is pretty much background in any quilt. You could easily expand this to stitch to meander over the whole surface of your quilt, but you’ll want to expand the clovers to about the size of your hand first, otherwise you’d be quilting that sucker for the rest of your life!
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Let’s go quilt,
Leah Day
