Quilting the Pot of Petunias Quilt Block

It’s time to quilt the Pot of Petunias quilt block with many fun designs: Circles, Microstippling, Stippling, feathers, and Echo Shell:

As you can see I decided to stitch my flower block up a notch with extra Microstippling in the flowers. You don’t have to do this of course, but I like to add that little punch of extra texture in a few areas. I also did this in the center of the Daisy Dresden Plate (Block 4) so by adding it to this block too, the quilting design is nicely balanced through the quilt.

Adding dense quilting like this will make that small area a bit stiff, but since the rest of the quilt is quilted on a 1/2-inch scale or bigger it will still remain soft and cushy. Learn how to quilt all of these beautiful designs in this new quilting tutorial:

Click Here to find the quilt pattern for the Pot of Petunias Quilt Block.

My favorite part of this quilt block is how the Stippling connects the different quilting designs together so there were very few thread breaks. I quilted through the tight areas around the stems and leaves around the flowers and down to the base of the vase where I could connect with the feather designs.

Connecting the designs together this way made for a very fast quilting project. Stippling is one of my favorite designs for exactly this kind of quilting because you can wiggle through the different spaces fast and with minimal thread breaks.

Sometimes I hear quilters say “Anything but Stippling!” and I understand because if you’ve been quilting for a long time, chances are you’ve seen that design quilted A LOT.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad design. Stippling is often the perfect design to quilt through complex areas and it can’t be beat for machine quilting a large scale, fast, all-over filler for your quilts.

It can get boring to quilt if you stick with the same wiggly lines for everything. Remember you can always mix it up with Sharp Stippling, Zippling, and Circuit Board too.

Get a load of those feathers! I think this is one of my favorite ways to fill in the flower vase in this block. We’ve quilted nine different vases so far this year, so if you don’t like one design in particular, remember you can always swap it out with a design from another block.

What do you think of the Pot of Petunias quilt block? Are you ready to tackle another Dresden Plate next month? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day