How to Quilt Kelp Fan – #467

I’m nearly finished preparing everything for quilt market this week so I decided to take a break from thinking about fabric to think about machine quilting! Here’s a cute new quilting design for you today that features a bit of thread painting, travel stitching, and echoing to make a really beautiful texture for your quilts:

This fun design is called Kelp Fan because it reminds me of a flowy water plant for some reason. I love organic designs like this and, while it’s a bit time consuming to quilt, I think the texture is totally worth it. Learn how to quilt it in this new video:

Click Here to find hundreds of inspiring quilting designs in the book 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs. 

So how does Kelp Fan stack up with other quilting designs? Let’s learn more about it:

Difficulty Level – Intermediate. I set the difficulty here based on the travel stitching and thread painted dots which can be tricky to master. If you build up too much thread in these areas, it can cause your thread to shred so watch out for that as you’re forming each filled circle shape.

Design Family – Pivoting – For Kelp Fan we’re starting with a cluster of wiggly lines, then pivoting and echoing around it multiple times to create a little cluster of texture. Some similar quilting designs are Swirling Petals and Wire Flourish.

Now where will this new machine quilting design work on your quilts? The nice thing about Pivoting designs is they can basically work anywhere! You can quilt this on a small scale and add gorgeous texture to the border, background, or sashing of a quilt, or you can expand the design much bigger and quilt it over your whole quilt using All Over Style quilting.

So there’s no right or wrong way to use this design! Where do you plan to use it? Do you like the thread painting element or will you leave your circles open?

Share your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube Channel so you’ll be the first to know when we publish our next quilting video!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day