Free Motion Quilt Egyptian Fans – #443

I’ve got a craving for new free motion quilting designs and I’ve decided to turn Monday’s post into a special new design day. Don’t worry, we’re still going to learn beautiful walking foot designs every Wednesday! Let’s check out the new free motion quilting design for today:

This is Egyptian Fans, an elegant quilting design created with simple curves and soft echoes to fill your quilts with beautiful texture. It’s a Pivoting Design, but this particular combination of angles and curves has never come easily for me. I have trouble changing from an inner to outer to inner curve easily because my hands want to make all inner curves. Watch the video to see what I mean:

When a design doesn’t initially feel natural for you, the best thing to do is draw it. Draw it on EVERYTHING and draw it ALL the time! It might begin to feel repetitive and boring and that is actually the point. You want to get so familiar with those shapes and angles that you can draw (and eventually quilt) that design in your sleep.

At some point you’ll be able to stop concentrating so hard on the specific shapes and just be able to kick back into the flow of quilting the design. So give Egyptian Fans a try today and let me know if this design felt natural to you and where you plan to use it in your beautiful quilts!

Looking for more free motion quilting inspiration…maybe in a handy spiral-bound book form? Check out 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, the perfect book for anyone searching for free motion quilting inspiration!

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.

2 Responses

  1. franni1 says:

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B270VbepxGCDZnZ2M3BsT09uZnM/edit?usp=docslist_api

    Tried this on the border of a mat I was finishing off using a Robert Kaufmann hummingbird panel. I definitely should have practised more first, as the inner curves need to go in more, but it's a really good pattern which I'll be using again when I have a larger space to fill. Was also trying to do gingko leaves as FMQ but as you can see in the detail pic , that too needs more practice!

    But at least it's finished!
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B270VbepxGCDRHdsbDhZa29FUWM/edit?usp=docslist_api

  2. Leah Day says:

    Beautiful Franni! I think you did a great job. Yes, a bit more practice never hurts, but sometimes you just have to jump right on the machine and have some fun!

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