Day 78 – Bleeding Heart

I’m bursting at the seams today for more than one reason, but I’ll try my best to hold it in long enough to share today’s filler design: Bleeding Heart.

I never would have thought I’d be such a heart freak. I chuck it up to hearts being an easy design to stitch and extremely versatile with what you can do with them.

At least everyone will have loads of heart designs for Valentine’s Day! I know I’ve really dropped the ball with Halloween, but for some reason I can’t seem to MAKE myself design certain things in particular.

I know that as soon as Halloween is past, I’ll have extreme inspiration for 10 scary designs. It just goes to show that you can’t force it! Designs must come on their own.

Inspiration – My mother grew Bleeding Heart flowers in her garden for years. Little did she know that one of my favorite pastimes was meticulously ripping the flowers apart.

So while quilting Heart Paisley the other day, I started wondering what it would look like if I started combining paisley shapes, such as the tear drop and the heart shape.

Once I quilted it, I was reminded of those bleeding heart flowers. Pretty cool indeed!

Design Family – Pivoting. Like paisley, this design is created by pivoting off a single point to create your shapes, then echos of that shape. This means that this design will work in just about any place on your quilt.

Difficulty Level – Intermediate. I’d say this is one of the easiest paisley inspired designs I’ve done so far. The shapes are simple and flow really quickly, which is great if you’re in a speed quilting marathon for all your Christmas quilts!

Directional Texture – All directions. The heart shapes flow from any direction and give a nice overall texture to your quilt.

Suggestions for Use – Several years ago I purchased Passion for Patchwork by Lise Bergene, which is an excellent quilting book of fun, folksy designs and loads of hearts.

I could definitely see using Bleeding Heart on any of the quilts in this book, especially the plaid, square quilt on the back of the book.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

Day 53 – Heart Paisley