Manly Quilting Design – Josh’s Ladders #236

I have a new manly quilting design for you to stitch today! Last week Josh asked if he could contribute his own design to the Free Motion Quilting Project so this is Josh’s Ladders:

Just in case you’re looking for another masculine quilting design, make sure to check out our Bow Tie Parade quilting tutorial. Between ladders and bow ties, how many other manly shapes can we use as inspiration for our quilts?

Unfortunately at the beginning of this challenge, I really didn’t know how to film my quilting clearly and certainly didn’t realize that fabric and thread choice was essential for having the stitches show up clearly.

Here’s a selection of early designs all stitched on light fabrics with dark threads. They showed up okay, but I don’t think they look as good as they could:

This weekend I’ve been going back through and quilting many of these designs again onto darker fabrics with white thread so they show up better.

I must say, it was fun stitching back through those early designs! A lot has changed between then and now and it was really interesting to see how much my quilting has improved in the last 14 months.

One design in particular is giving me fits. Sea Anemone is one challenging little bugger. Finally I broke out pencil and paper to find a better way to quilt it and hopefully I’ll be able to get that one finished this afternoon.

Now let’s get back to learning this manly quilting design!

Difficulty Level – Advanced. Josh’s Ladders can feel challenging to quilt because of how the ladders fit together. There is a lot of travel stitching involved which needs to be stitched slowly and carefully to keep the design neat and ladders looking like…. well, actual ladders!

Fitting the ladders together so randomly might be what made it tricky for me to stitch a few times. If you like, fit the ladders together in a more grid-like arrangement and that might be easier to stitch.

Design Family – Stacking. I didn’t realize just how many stacking designs we had until I created the pages organizing everything! These are the designs that can fit into most areas of your quilt. You can easily expand this design to fit into large areas, or shrink it to fill in small spaces.

Directional Texture – No Direction. Straight lines and sharp angles usually make for a very flat, directionless design. While this might not seem very useful, flat designs make for terrific background filler designs because they recede into the background when stitched densely on your quilts.

Suggestions for Use – Since Josh designed this design, I’m thinking about using it in a quilt for James. Right now James loves everything about robots, space, and cars, which would make for a really interesting quilt when combined all together! Maybe if I connect everything with Josh’s Ladders it will make sense? It’ll be fun to try at least!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day