54. Learn How to Quilt Glazed Donuts, Design #403

Did anyone say Glazed Donuts?! This design is making my mouth water!

free motion quilting | Leah Day

This is a fun combination of Echo Shell and Stippling, two great skill building designs. When you put them both together, the result is an excellent texture that will work in all areas of your quilts.

Let’s learn how to quilt it together:

If you look closely at the picture above, notice how my scale changed from the first three Glazed Donuts. I actually stitched the first three, then ran out of bobbin thread, needed a snack, and ultimately walked away from this little square for several days.

When I came back to it, for some reason I was stitching tighter and denser that day and didn’t realize it until after the square was filled. This is a great example of how your quilting can change from day to day.
A great way to gauge how you’re quilting on any day, or to try to match your scale back to what you were stitching previously is to quilt a small square and compare it to your previous quilting. If you see that things are looking too dense, focus on swinging your lines out and increasing space where needed. If you see things looking too open, remind yourself of the scale you are going for and work to bring those lines closer together.
It’s good to understand and use scale when quilting any quilt, but don’t get obsessive about it. I’m certainly not going to restitch this square just because my stitching is a bit wider in one corner than the rest of the piece.
Please remember that small issues like this are only ever visible to ourselves! Chuck up these inconsistencies to learning and creating. We’re humans, not machines, so fluctuating scale is yet another sign a real person quilted your quilt with love and passion!
Let’s go quilt,
Leah Day

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

4 Responses

  1. Laura says:

    I like these… 🙂 I've been playing with circular templates with my midarm. I've a long way to go to master them, but such fun. This has given me another idea for trialling them.

  2. Jo says:

    I love this design. Something about it just really appeals to me. Can't wait to try stitching it. Thank you for sharing all your wonderful ideas.

  3. Heidi says:

    I really love this donut design! Though I admit it struck me as donuts with sprinkles, LOL. I think I have rainbow sprinkles on my brain 😀

  4. Paula B. says:

    I think this is one of my most favorite designs! Adorable 🙂 I didn't see a difference in scale at all, but it did make me wonder if maybe laying something on my quilt top to use as a scale guide might be a good reminder? Maybe a coin or piece of bright, cut construction paper? Anything to use as a size comparison. I found myself drawing echo shells on my agenda at quilt guild meeting tonight and saw that my scale got larger and larger as time went by….

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