Seaweed Flower Quilting Design #269

First, what is a Seaweed Flower, and second, how can it be a quilting design? Inspiration can come from anywhere! One of my favorite audiobooks is “The Host” by Stephanie Meyer. In the book, an alien has come to Earth from a water planet where it was a seaweed. The way the author described the seaweeds – large tentacle plantlike creatures with millions of eyes, was so real I decided to try to stitch a version of it in free motion:

You know something cool? Seaweed Flower uses the exact same design elements as our sweet Lollipop Flower quilting design, but with curvy lines. I also marked a circle on my quilt block so the spirals would line up more or less in a circle.

Seaweed Flower will be easier to quilt than Lollipop Flower because this time you can stitch wiggly lines to make the spirals and eliminate the need for so much travel stitching.

The effect is much more flower-like! It’s interesting how small changes in the design and how it’s quilted can change the effect of the quilting design completely. Consider this if you’ve been avoiding fabric marking. It’s really not cheating! Using a circle template to mark a shape on your quilt is the best possible way to create the shape you want.

Now let’s learn how to stitch these Seaweeds into our quilts!

Seaweed Flower Quilting Design Details

Inspiration – When quilting, I’m using listening to audiobooks. I find a lot of inspiration in science fiction and fantasy books. After all, we’ve learned a Sci Fi quilting design before, why not an seaweed alien inspiration too?

Design Family – Center Fill. Working from the center of your quilting space, this design will work best in large, open areas of your quilt. You can make your Sea Weed Flowers are big as you want, but it would be a tricky design to try to squish in a very small area.

Directional Texture – Center Focused. You really can’t miss the bulls-eye like texture of this design! Place it in the centers of applique flowers for a really neat focal point.

Suggestions for Use – I really like this Seaweed Flower quilting design, especially stitched into a circle shape. I think this would look so pretty stitched as one of the flowers in the Flower Bouquet wall hanging quilt. A few quilters have suggested digitizing these designs for machine embroidery too. That would certainly make them easier to stitch with a lot less practice to master free motion quilting!

Let’s go Quilt!

Leah Day

So Sweet Lollipop Flower Quilting Design