Day 54 – Broken Glass

This design is also featured in the DVD Beginner Free Motion Quilting Fillers, as well as the ebook From Daisy to Paisley.

Do you read comic books? That might be a pretty random question for a quilting blog, but there’s a reason I’m asking – comic books provide excellent inspiration for filler designs like today’s design Broken Glass:

This is a terrific design for those special occasions when a little death and destruction on your quilt is just what the doctor ordered!

Inspiration – If you’ve never read a comic book before, seriously, go pick one up the next time you’re in the grocery store.

My current favorite is Marvel comics which come with 4 to 5 different stories each. The stories are surprisingly good and entertaining!

They usually start in the middle of a scene when the action hero is just getting over a big battle, they chat a bit and catch you up to the story, then the bad guys come back and SMASH! THUD! BANG! more action erupts!

Typically someone gets thrown out of a window or glass breaks at least once in every story which is how it became the inspiration for this design.

Difficulty Level – Super Beginner. Yeah, I know this looks really tough and advanced, but it’s really not. There’s a small amount of traveling involved in order to get to your next shape, but forming the shapes is very easy since you have the freedom to stitch them any size and shape you want.

Design Family – Overlapping. This is a new design type invented with this design. The idea is based on starting with a shape, then traveling to start a new shape, continually overlapping the shapes on top of one another.

This will work great to fill large areas very fast, but probably wouldn’t be a good design to use if you needed to densely fill an area. When you’re doing techniques like Trapunto, you really want more density in your background areas in order to make your puffy areas look more puffy.

Directional Texture – No Direction. When you stitch this over an area, there’s really no particular direction that the filler moves your eye to.

Suggestions for Use – I think this would look terrific over a bright kid quilt! I’ve been asking James if he’d like a big quilt since he’s grown out of his baby quilts. When asked what color he responded with a resounding “GREEN!”

I’m not sure if it’s because he really likes green, or that’s the only color he remembers the name of!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day