Bouncy Quilting Blast! Ball Bearings Quilting Tutorial

This Ball Bearings quilting tutorial is a bouncy echo blast! We’re quilting donut shapes, then filling them in with bouncy echoes to create an intense quilting texture. Where will this quilting design work best? Keep reading to find out below and find a free quilting video to see how it’s stitched.

This Ball Bearings quilting design is stitched by quilting a donut shape, then filling in the wide middle ring with bouncy echoes. I’ve used these bouncy echoes before in Fossil Snail. It’s a design element that really punches up our quilting texture, but it can be time consuming to quilt.

So how exactly do we quilt it? Learn how Ball Bearings is stitched in this quilting video:

Learn more about this Ball Bearings Quilt Design

Difficulty Level – Advanced. There is a lot of precise quilting, travel stitching, and echoing to quilt Ball Bearings. It’s all about precision and stitching pretty curving shapes.

The foundation for the design is Echo Shell, and quilted by forming a donut shape with half or quarter circles and echoes. If you can’t quilt the circle shapes nicely, feel free to mark the designs with a circle template instead. No, this isn’t cheating – it’s a good way to quilt the design and get more practice quilting on marked lines as well.

Take it slow, maintain a good grip on the quilt, and after quilting the donut shape, then swing inside with your bouncy echoes. Those will likely quilt very quickly and easily through the middle.

Design Family – Echoing. These designs are simple: create a shape, travel stitch, and echo that shape a set distance around. This particular design stitches this up a notch by going back inside to fill, but in essence, you’re filling your quilt with half circles which can be as large or as small as you like, so this can go in all areas of your quilt.

Directional Texture – All Directions. Circles seem to swirl from all directions with this design so make sure to put it in places that need a lot of attention!

Suggestions for Use – Ball Bearings is an intense quilting design! I think this will work best on an art quilt or wall hanging. Because there is so much thread going on the quilt, the quilt will end up on the stiff side. Rather than fighting this and trying to make this into a bed fill, embrace it and use Ball Bearings on a small scale in quilts designed to hang on a wall.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

Quilting Design #32 – Fossil Snail

Free Motion Design #6 – Echo Shell