Free Motion Quilting Design #21 – Wave Chain

I’ve been reading a great quilting book called Pathways to Better Quilting. Today I’m sharing a design from the book created by combining shapes together to create this Wave Chain free motion quilting design:

According to Pathways for Better Quilting, free motion quilting designs are broken down into 5 shapes. The idea is by using one or more of these shapes you create a new free motion quilting filler design, like this Wave Chain.

The book only included five shapes to create designs and I know there are many more shapes we can use. You can do a million things with a line! You make make it wiggle here or wiggle there, and this doesn’t encompass the huge changes that echoing can have for any design: see brain coral.

Case in point is this project. If there were only 5 shapes, how could I possibly create so many different designs? Small changes like echoing, crossing lines, or even rounding points can make a huge difference in how a design looks on an actual quilt.

Learn more about free motion quilting Wave Chain:

Inspiration: I was feeling adventurous and decided to limit myself to two shapes. I first created a “U” shape, pointed the tip and swung back to create a new “U” shape. I then stacked the shapes in a line to create the wave chain.

Difficulty Level: Beginner. Stacking the designs perfectly can be a little tricky. This is a repetitive movement design that gets real boring real fast so it’s not much of a challenge.

Design Family – Edge to Edge.

Directional Texture: 2 directions. Yes, Wave Chain has a nice swirly texture, but because it’s quilted in a horizontal or vertical line, that’s what your eye will pick up on.

Suggestions for Use: I see this being expanded to be a good overall fill for a gift quilt, but not something I would use very densely in the background. This design is fast, easy to master and would look really nice with busy fabrics and loads of piecing.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

Free Motion Quilting Design #16 – Brain Coral