Free Motion Quilted Flower Bouquet

I’m so delighted to share this beautiful example of free motion quilting and fusible applique – my Flower Bouquet quilt! This wall hanging quilt was finished just last night and I can’t tell you how delighted I am with it:

Free Motion Quilted Flower Designs

Flower Bouquet is the first quilt I’ve made since starting the Free Motion Quilting Project that really showcases our these designs to their best effect. I love how the flower designs stand out around the vase. While I could have appliqued flower shapes on the quilt top, quilting them directly on the background fabric had a much neater effect!

Here’s links to tutorials for each of the flower quilting designs I used in Flower Bouquet:

• Sunflower – Very easy, very simple quilting design that requires no marking or space estimation. It’s just overlapping petals and very easy to stitch.
• Spinning Daisy – This flower quilting design is a combination of a daisy with feather petals. You might want to mark a few lines just to get the “spin” of the daisy started so the petals are consistently spaced.
• Woven Flower – Interwoven lines form this flower design, which can feel a little tricky to stitch. Mark it if you need to!
• Loopy Flower – This flower design is formed with loopy petals that look a lot harder to quilt than they are.
• Super Daisy – The first flower quilting design I ever stitched, and still one of my absolute favorites.

Final Touches to Finishing a Wall Hanging Quilt

Last night I blocked this quilt by steaming it with my iron, then pulling and pushing on it until the borders were straight and finishing at the same size throughout. It ended up finishing at 22″ x 29″ which I realize is the perfect size for a small, quick project without a lot of fuss.

Now when Josh saw it, he got super excited about the border:

This is Ocean Currents, a foundational design that was SUPER easy to stitch through the borders. All I did was set my foundation with a curving, swirling line, and then all I had to do was echo quilt it to fill in the area.

My original plan was to fill one half of the foundation with bright green thread and the other half with dark green thread, but Josh argued that the black looked better so it blended perfectly and allowed the green to really stand out.

Since I know I’m going to make more of these, I decided to try it and I really like how this turned out. Foundational Designs are definitely moving up on my list of absolute favorite designs.

How to Quilt the Background of a Wall Hanging Quilt

I had some questions about the background area around the flowers and how I was going to keep the stitching in this area from competing with the flowers.

It’s really just as simple as matching your thread color. I used a dark purple thread that perfectly matched the purple fabric and stitched Sharp Stippling throughout this area. This design flattened out the background, allowing the flowers to stand out even better.

For the stems, I left them blank. Call it lazy, but I just didn’t think they needed any more texture than they already had from the pretty batik fabric.

Quilting Beautiful Textures on Fusible Applique

But the vase and table was a different matter! This is Pebbles in a Stream stitched horizontally across the vase area. I choose to stitch this in a bit lighter thread color and it worked out very nice:

The only other issue I struggled with was the bottom of the wall hanging quilt. I didn’t want the vase of flowers to look like it was floating in space. I decided to stitch the table into the quilt and contrast thread boldly here so the stitching would really show off.

This is something I threw in for fun in the background to give the effect that the vase was sitting on a table. It wasn’t pieced into the background, it’s only stitching!

For this area, I knew I wanted a vertical texture to oppose the horizontal texture in the vase. I was a bit stuck on a filler choice for awhile because I wanted something vertical, but not necessarily straight lines. I ended up going with Gentle Flames and I think it was absolutely perfect for the space.

Having made one Flower Bouquet wall hanging quilt, all I can see are the different possibilities to making many more! I really want to play with stitching the flowers with different colored threads and see what a version looks like with all the same flower, just in different colors and sizes.

I also want to play with a wider border, different fillers and textures in the background, vase, bottom area, and borders. There are just so many possibilities!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah