Free Motion Quilting Echo Arches – Design #225

I’m back to quilting today with a beautiful design called Echo Arches. This is making me think of cathedrals and flying buttresses!

Lately I’ve been reading The Life of Elizabeth I by Allison Weir (affiliate link) and I’m fascinated with the elaborate designs and over-the-top gaudiness of that era. Back then royalty needed to look more beautiful and spectacular than anyone else and the descriptions of how Elizabeth would deck herself out is really amazing.

Echo Arches was inspired by images of a cathedral in a BBC series called Monarchy. The narrator will often walk through these huge buildings and the rings of arches and stones make for an impressive back drop to the story he’s illustrating.

I decided to try my hand at playing with the arches and I think they’ll definitely go into my Queen Elizabeth wholecloth I’m planning to make one day. Now let’s learn how to quilt them!

Difficulty Level – Intermediate. While teaching classes on free motion quilting I usually have a few people that naturally quilt Pivoting Designs well and another group that rock Echoing Designs. It’s funny how that works so definitely try this new design and see which group you fall into!

Design Family – Echoing. These designs are created by stitching a shape, in this case a pointed arch, then travel stitching and echoing that shape multiple times.

The scale of the design (how big it is and how much space it takes up) is set by your starting shape and your echoes. If you want this to take up bunches of space, make your starting arch HUGE and your echoes really WIDE and it will cover your quilt faster than minute popcorn (well, maybe not that fast).

Directional Texture – All Directions. I like the look of this design because the arches really stand out, almost like little almonds, from between the rows of echoes.

Suggestions for Use – I’m planning to use this design on a wholecloth quilt where I will minimize the arches so this design reads a bit flatter and more as a background design. Another nice use would be to quilt this on a large scale over a holiday or Christmas themed quilt. For some reason this design just feels kinda formal to me. What do you think?

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day