Quilt Along #41 – Invasion of the Pods

It’s Quilt Along time and this month we’re busting through quilts quickly with big designs or techniques to blast through loads of space with every pass.

This week I’ve taken a look at the Zen Breaks we learned during the summer while working on our modern quilt top. I really like Zen Breaks and I think it’s a great way to break down and secure all the areas of a quilt and have nice spacing for multiple designs.

However, stitching across the quilt with all those long lines of quilting to break it up can be a bit of a pain. I began thinking of ways to break up the quilt and use multiple designs, but be able to move from the center in more of a clustering fashion.

I like this idea, but straight lines and sharp angles are harder to produce on a domestic sewing machine without marking. If I used this, I’d want those straight lines to be perfectly straight and probably end up marking each one as I worked through a quilt.

But what if that design could be bent into a free form arrangement more like Zen Breaks? And what if it could be quilted free form through a quilt from the center using Quadrant Quilting?

All these questions had to be answered, and as luck would have it, they worked out into a great new design / filling technique – PODS!

Basically you start with a cluster of a design. Stitch until you are bored with filling it, then surround it with a few rows of echo quilting. You’ve just formed a pod of a design!

Now branch off one side with a new design. Quilt until you’re border and surround it with echoes. Wash and repeat and watch this video to see how it works in real life:

Difficulty Level – Intermediate.

Design Family – Foundational.

In truth, the photo isn’t very clear when this design is stitched over the Batik Beauty Quilt because there’s so many wiggly lines of quilting with this design. So here’s a break down of how it’s stitched. First start with a small cluster of any design:

Next, surround it with echoing:

Then branch out with another cluster of another design:

Then surround it with echoing:

To fill up a whole quilt, just apply this formula in rows using Quadrant Quilting. Not only is it extremely entertaining to quilt so many different designs, it also moves quickly because those repeated lines of echoing eat up loads of space with every pass!

So with one more quilt buster under your belt, what are you going to blast through this week?

I don’t know about you, but the only thing I’ll likely be busting through is a very yummy turkey tomorrow on Thanksgiving.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day