Cohesive Sampler Quilting Design Part 4

Sampler quilts can be busy and chaotic, but I think we’ve creating a cohesive sampler quilt design in this series! Click Here to find the first post in this series.

Dresden Plate Cohesive Design Play

4th Row, Right Block – This is the awesome Dresden Plate Quilt Block I’ve been playing designs off of throughout this quilt. I used this motif in multiple blocks and this very repetition helped to tie the quilting designs together across very different sampler quilt blocks.

If you had told me a year ago that I’d like Dresden Plate quilt blocks in the future, I would have told you you were crazy. I was never much of a fan until I quilted my guild’s donation quilt last spring. In this quilt, I quilted the Dresden Plates with this internal petal design that was heavily stippled, then the outside of the Dresden Plate fan was made puffy with trapunto.

Update 2023 – Can you believe I not only fell in love with Dresden Plate quilt blocks, I even designed a template set to make them? This set can be used to make dozens of Dresden Plates and new Dresden Rings! Click Here to learn more.

Repeating the Same Quilting Motif

Last row, Left block – This block reminds me of an ice cream cone for some reason! I again softened the curves with more petal shapes that build on the Dresden plate motif design.

This is one block where you have a lot of room around the central quilting motif that you could do some showy quilting in. You could surround the central motif with freeform feathers or a thin line of chain of pearls. You’ve got more than enough room to play, so use it!

Quilting Design Ideas for Flowers and Leaves

Last row, Middle Block – I didn’t design this block as well as I would have liked. The pink leaf was kind of a trial run and it came out looking more like a jack o’ lantern than I was hoping.

Check out the blue leaf for the design that would work better. It looks a bit less like a jagged mouth!

Last row, right block – This block is very beautifully appliqued. I don’t think you need to do more than emphasize the applique so that it stands out a bit more.

I did add a little swirl through the center of the flowers that you might want to stitch with invisible thread just to add a little more stitching within the flower shapes.

Quilting Ideas for the Border Blocks

Quarter Circle Blocks – These mariner’s compass style blocks fit into the on-point design of this quilt beautifully.

Personally, I felt that trying to quilt over these blocks or distract from them would be a crime, so I simply stitched in the ditch around the points, then filled in the white background with fillers.

The circle shape could be filled in with a variety of fillers, straight, or curving lines depending on what you like to quilt.

Sashing – I asked Randi and she said the sashing was 1 1/4″ wide. With sashing this skinny, there’s just not enough space to fit a machine quilting design.

I drew some lines over the quarter circle shapes and I think this could also look good over the sashing of the whole quilt. Space your lines around 1/4″ apart and make sure to mark this before you quilt it.

You could ruin the whole quilt by having wiggly lines in the sashing, distracting from the blocks and setting. You could also mark zig zaggy lines through the sashing as well, but honestly, I think this quilt is busy enough as it is.

In the future whenever you piece a quilt, consider cutting your sashing wider than you usually do. Instead of 2″ or 2.5″ sashing, cut it 3.5″ or 4″ wide so you have a nice open area to play with with some edge to edge filler designs.

So that’s it for this Machine Quilting Idea series! Make sure to check out all of these posts to learn more about how I planned the quilting design for each block. Creating a cohesive quilting design isn’t difficult – it’s just a matter of picking a few quilting motifs and figuring out ways to use them repeatedly over the sampler quilt blocks.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day