The Texture of Stippling

For the past several weeks we’ve been working on Stippling. We’ve stippled several practice pieces, seen how this design works in rows, in blocks, around blocks in sashing, and on multiple scales.

Through this learning process, I really hope you’ve been able to take a closer look at this wiggly, curvy design and appreciate it’s texture. Excuse me as I ramble off on a weird tangent about design texture…
Stippling really is like nothing else.

I decided to start this year with this design because it is so popular and iconic in quilting, but also because it’s so darn beautiful.

Yes, you heard me right, I think Stippling is gorgeous!

There’s several designs in this Zentangle, but it’s the Stippling that really ties them all together.

I often hear quilters scoff a bit at this design “oh, it’s just stippling…” and I can understand this attitude. This design is popular to the point of saturation. We’ve seen it, we know it, and it’s starting to feel like a popular actress who’s face is appearing on magazine covers and in movies a bit too often.

But don’t let this pervasively dismissive attitude to Stippling color your perceptions. This is indeed an extremely useful and necessary design.

Stippling can do things that almost no design can. It can not only fill large expanses of your quilt on a large scale, it can also shrink down to a micro scale to fill and flatten areas where no other design can fit.

I hope you can stop for a moment to appreciate the wonderful texture this design has. On a denser scale, stippling is FLAT, but it’s also OPEN which makes the design appear lighter on the surface of your quilts.

This is a rare quality in designs because most that flatten are also quite dark with thread texture. Stippling is unique in that it can flatten an area densely without attracting attention.

In this role, Stippling is no longer a showy design, but an assistant behind the main attraction.

So the next time you hear someone say “oh, it’s just stippling…” please inform them that this design is much more than “just” anything. It’s an AWESOME design! It can do AMAZING things! And it does it all with grace and soft curves and not a hair out of place.

I’m off to quilt a bit more stippling!

Leah