Josh’s Gridlines in a Modern Building Block

Josh here for my crack at “gridlines” in a modern Building block.

Once again, we have some dense 1/8″ scale stitching. This is a great practice block! No curves, no circles, no stippling–just basic straight lines, and a whole lot of them. We have 1″, 1/2″, 1/4″, and 1/8″ scales. The key here to find a good path and minimize travel stitching, and since everything is broken down in grids, this comes pretty naturally without having to plot a complicated course beforehand.

That said, this one took a lot of time, so if you’re a beginner like me, make sure you have a good 30 minutes to an hour.

The diagonal lines in the corner mixed things up a bit, especially as you had to maneuver around the edge and my fingers didn’t have enough room outside the block.

Because I’m using Spoonflower cheater fabric, I elected to skip every other line in the 1/8″ section as the lines were already on the block. As I write this and watch the video, I can see I now have a lot more experience under my belt and if I had to stitch this dense area now I think I’d flip over the block and stitch by freehand on the 1/8″ scale.

Here’s how the block came out:

free motion quilting | Leah Day
And the back:
free motion quilting | Leah Day

I’m proud of this one. Once the quilt is assembled, the dense travel stitching and errors on the edges will disappear, and I hope this block will really stand out.
Until next week, let’s go quilt!

Josh

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.

2 Responses

  1. I can see how you are improving. Keep up the good work.

  2. Ms MoomMist says:

    I used the same technique with my diamonds on the Cheater Cloth as Josh did. It make quick work of both sections.

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