79. Free Motion Quilt Space Feather, #420

I don’t know about you, but I always start getting withdrawal symptoms this time of year from lack of quilting and sewing time! If I’m short tempered and distracted, chances are a quiet 15 minutes on the machine is all I need. Luckily this week’s design is short and sweet and involves almost no travel stitching:

free motion quilting | Leah Day

This Space Feather was originally shared in the class Free Motion Fillers Volume 2. If you’d like to learn how to turn a corner with feather designs like these, definitely give this class a try!

The intention with Space Feather was to create a feather shape with almost no travel stitching at all. Instead of traveling, you just bounce against the starting stem. The only tricky thing is getting the angle and curve of your feathers smooth and consistent, but what you can’t freehand, you can always mark!

free motion quilting | Leah Day

And just to clarify, marking a design isn’t cheating. In fact, you can’t even tell a design is marked if the lines are all erased completely after quilting, so no one will be able to tell either way.

I often mark designs if I’m struggling to get proper placement, or if I simply want to take the guess work out of the design and don’t want to waste time ripping if I get it wrong. I learned quickly while making my quilted jacket that marking the feathers ahead of time saved a lot of time and headaches getting the feathers to fit into every nook and cranny of my jacket front and back.

So when in doubt – MARK!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah

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. The feather is such a classic design that everyone tends to like. And your jacket is pretty awesome.
    Luann

  2. Liz King says:

    Lovely design Leah. And I'm still in awe of that beautiful jacket- it's so intricate and the variation in colour from the dyeing look incredible. Liz

  3. Crystle says:

    Thank you so much for this blog..I can just read it all day! But I am trying to practice free motion – and it is killing me that it looks so bad! But you were the only one that told me my back loops are "normal" and that I was moving my fabric to fast. Problem solved!!!!

    Next problem – my thread is fraying. somewhere between the top of the last thread through to the needle. I even took the end off the machine to see what is going on and I can't figure it out. I am using Connecting Threads 50 weight. Any idea?

  4. Gladys says:

    Thank you very much for this vĂ­deo! Your jacket is amazing! I love it! And your explanations to make it are magnificent! I dream of doing something like this someday! Thank you for sharing! Have a beautiful day!

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