Combine Two Quilting Designs to Get a Complex Path

What do you get when you combine Henna Foofy and Bubble Wand into one design? You get a really Complex Path!

Complex Path Quilting Design Tutorial

It’s been a day of building shelves, moving, reorganizing, and purging loads of useless stuff. I really love to move things around. There’s something so satisfying from cleaning and organizing and finding that perfect place for everything!

So while I run off to put my desk together, you hang out and learn how to quilt Complex Path:

Inspiration – Thinking back to watching Avatar. I really loved those swinging tentacle trees that were all over the place in that movie.

I decided to try my own version using a combination of two free motion quilting designs we’ve already learned: Henna Foofy and Bubble Wand.

Difficulty Level – Advanced. This really isn’t that hard, but it’s a building design, and each section will build layers of thread and require a lot of traveling.

Wait! Before you shut your brain down, hear me out! As long as you’re using a thin, strong thread, like Isacord polyester embroidery thread, and good tension on your machine, any skill level could stitch this.

Just be patient and take your time and you’ll do just fine!

Design Family – Edge to Edge. Overall this design is stitched first from edge to edge, then filled again. You could easily use this design in an open, uncomplicated area of your quilt that needed a little complexity.

Directional Texture – 2 Directions. This is a good design to create either horizontal or vertical texture with. Imagine the swinging tentacle trees of Avatar. Wouldn’t that look cool in a quilt?

Suggestions for Use – I regret not using this design as the background of My Cup Runneth Over, but may still decide to take a seam ripper to the background section and fix that problem.

I think this would make for a really cool background design. You could mark the paths or make them up as you go and use this texture to fill anything from a kid’s quilt to an art quilt.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

6 Responses

  1. Amy says:

    Love this one Leah!

    Amy

  2. QuiltSwissy says:

    you may have inspired me to actually CLEAN up my quilt studio! but then again……maybe not. We shall see how goes the afternoon!

    Love the complex path, now I need something to put it on!

    glen

  3. Heckety says:

    Yikes! I'm only an amateur! I'll try this one in about 37 years maybe!

  4. Ken and Dot says:

    Reminds me of my grandmother's tatting!

  5. QuiltSwissy says:

    Just to let you know, I did NO cleaning today or yesterday. Maybe tomorrow……..

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