Quilting Crazy Curves on a Wonky Christmas Tree Quilt

Today I’m finishing my Wonky Christmas Tree quilt with a super simple quilting design called Crazy Curves in the border. This beautiful texture is the perfect contrast to the Swirling Water design we quilted last week.

Learn how I quilted the border of this quilt in this new tutorial video!

Yep, I noticed the lights on the machine were too bright in this video. I’m taking steps to fix that for the next video. Sorry about that!

Click here to find all the videos shared so far on this machine.

Just in case this is first post you’ve found on this Wonky Christmas Tree quilt I have a few more videos for you to check out.

Click here to find the free quilt pattern for the Wonky Christmas Tree quilt. It’s a super easy, free form piecing design that makes super cute trees!

For this quilt, I pieced three blocks together and surrounded them with a white border. This turned out a bit ho-hum with the gray background fabric, so I decided to really stitch it up a notch with extra special machine quilting.

The first step was to secure the layers of the quilt together so I stitched in the ditch on the Grace Qnique 14+ around the trees and outlines of the blocks.

Have you ever stitched in the ditch with free motion quilting? While it is a little easier to stitch in the ditch with walking foot quilting it’s absolutely possible to stitch in the ditch with free motion quilting to. Just need to slow down to keep better control over your quilting stitches.

After stitching in the ditch I flipped the quilt over and quilted the background around the Christmas tree with Razzle Dazzle thread in the bobbin. This technique allows you to quilt with thread that’s too thick to pass through your needle. Click here to find that tutorial on the bobbin thread work.

After filling in the background of each block, the quilt was really looking good, but I wanted to fill in the borders as well so it would hang well on the wall and have a balanced, beautiful quilting design. I decided to quilt this space with Crazy Curves using Magnifico thread.

The best thing about the Crazy Curves quilting design is its free-form forgiving nature. The lines get closer together and further apart doesn’t matter at all. In fact the more irregular the curving lines are quilted the prettier this design will look on your quilts.

Even the Christmas tree block that I didn’t like looks great when surrounded completely with Crazy Curves. Some people say the quilting makes the quilt but I think in this case border design made the quilt and it’s my favorite part of this wall hanging!

What do you think of this Crazy Curves design? What designs would you have quilted in the border of this quilt? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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.

3 Responses

  1. Cheater needle. The batting looks very thick. what type. Maybe I jumped in at end and answers were already there. Will search.

  2. Betty M says:

    James, you are so cute! Keep on helping Mom.

  3. Leah Day says:

    I'm using Quilters Dream Puff for this quilt so it will be extra puffy.

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