Creative Quilting Design – Layered Flower #226

I’m in the mood to stitch a creative quilting design inspired by flower blooms. Of course just as the weather turns chilly, I’m looking for flowers in my yard for inspiration. LOL! Here’s a funky design I’ve quilted that I’m calling Layered Flower, stitched with layers and layers of triangle shaped leaves:

Layered Flower free motion quilting design tutorial

This flower is funky! I love the overlapping triangles and how the design seems to radiate from the center. A few ideas to quilt this up a notch:

  • Quilt each layer of the flower in a different color of thread
  • Color in the triangles with fabric markers
  • Stitch one layer of triangles as drunk triangles (wobbly lines) instead of straight lines

I love thinking of ways to make a quilting design more creative and fun! Let’s learn how to quilt Layered Flower and you can think about if you’d like to try those creative ideas:

Difficulty LevelIntermediate. This really isn’t very difficult, just simple triangles overlapping one another to create the flower shape. The one thing to watch out for is thread play and build up in the center of the flower. If it gets to thick, it might be tricky to stitch! 

Design Family – Center Fill. This really could be considered 2 different designs because it works from the center, but it’s also created by overlapping shapes.

Directional Texture – Center Focused. Layered Flower does look pretty similar to Delilah, but it’s actually easier to quilt because you don’t have to travel stitch to fit in your petals. Just overlap the lines and play with making your triangles all different sizes and shapes!

Suggestions for Use – I like the idea of making an appliqued quilt, only instead of actually appliqueing the flowers, quilt them in instead!

Let’s go quilt

Leah Day

Here’s a few more creative quilting designs to play with!

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

4 Responses

  1. Ken and Dot says:

    Leah,

    I love this one. I live in Nebraska and when you drive through the sandhills you see all the old windmills pumping water for the cattle. Layered flower reminds me of those windmills and a time fading away.
    Thanks,
    Dorothy

  2. Anonymous says:

    yes, I really like this one very much! I love flowers, my husband and I have a floral design show amoung other stuff. And I have seen a flowers like this…..you take a flat faced flower like a gerbera daisy or "dasy" mum, and cut the edge of the petals to form a square out of a circle. I just can't find a photo out there on the web at the moment to direct you to. Keep up the fantastic work!

  3. Emma says:

    Hi Leah, I've been enjoying your project since right near the beginning, and thought you might be interested in the quilt I've just finished. It's a wholecloth quilt made to resemble a pieced top, by marking blocks and using dense filler quilting in different colours to represent the pieces. I tried to use as many different designs as possible, and though I did repeat some, I used over 50. A lot were common designs, and some were my own, and a few were inspired by designs in your 365 days project. Funnily, I came up with a few very similar to yours before you shared them, after your project imspired me to try and come up with as many of my own fillers as I could! Here's a link to where I blogged about the quilt, with lots of photos: http://sampaguitaquilts.blogspot.com/2010/10/may.html

  4. Kay Lynne says:

    I think this is a really pretty flower. It looks like a Bachelor Button to me 🙂 It also could pass as a Mum.

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