Zigzag Quilting Design – ZAP! Flower #233
Let’s learn a zigzag quilting design filled I’m calling ZAP! Flower:
I love quilting zigzag designs! Jagged, zig-zaggy lines have been used a bit in Jagged Cosmos, Jagged Plain, Matrix Maze and Lightning Bolt (see all of these designs linked below), but I don’t think I’ve really pushed the full limits of what they can do!
Let’s have some fun quilting this angular zigzag flower design together:
Difficulty Level – Intermediate. For some reason when I got started free motion quilting I really didn’t like straight lines and sharp angles. I found them really distracting and therefor difficult to get into a good quilt flow with.
With time and more practice, I can now quilt these types of designs easily. So definitely try this out and even if it doesn’t work easily the first time around, make sure to come back to it after you’ve quilted a few quilts and see how it feels then.
Design Family – Center Fill. Most flower designs are center fill, which mean they start in the center and work out. Now in my stitched example, I filled the entire 4″ block with Zap! Flower, but you don’t have to do this.
If you’d like the design to have a more obvious flower shape with the petals very clearly showing off, then don’t continue to fill in all the extra lines around the flower. Instead pick another design to fill in the background and the flower will show up much better!
Directional Texture – Center Focused. The weird thing about straight lines and sharp angles is they really flatten out the texture of whatever they are stitched on. That makes this particular flower design a little less showy than Layered Flower.
Suggestions for Use – I’m planning on using this flower in the place of a flower applique, but you could also use it in the cornerstones or whole blocks of a quilt. If you want your flower to take up a lot of space, start with a large, quarter sized circle, and then branch out with 10″ zigzag petals. That’s going to be one space filling flower, no doubt about it!
Let’s go quilt,
Leah Day
