Josh’s Spirals & Pebbling in a Pinwheel Block

Josh here for my turn at free motion quilting spirals and pebbling in a pinwheel block.

I’ve always loved pebbling from a visual point of view, but I found stitching the design out pretty difficult. Clearly I need a lot of practice if I want to take pebbling to the next level, which I sincerely do. I’d recommend stitching on some scrap blocks to get a handle on pebbling, or spirals, or any filler design that’s not coming easily to you.

Speaking of spirals, you’ll see at the 2:35 mark I hit a speed bump with a skipped stitch. This was due to going in a direction the machine didn’t like and yielded some bird nesting. Under Leah’s tutelage, I worked through the skipped stitch area and ultimately decided not to rip out the bad stitching.

Now onto the pebbling. I really enjoy making these in figure 8 paths, but Leah was ultimately right as this gets confusing and you can easily miss a pebble.

Here’s the finished block:

You can see this is not my best work. I was pretty disappointed with how this turned out. But this is just one block in 42 and it’s important to keep going without getting bogged down.

So keep that in mind if you finish a block you think looks awful. Is it worth it to restitch the entire block, or even worse, fiddle with seam ripping and fixing and then ripping again as you fall into a feedback loop of perfectionism?

Until next week, let’s go quilt,

Josh