Answer for Tanya

This post is particularly for Tanya who asked me a question about the quilting process of a quilt. Quilting and me is a bit like chickens and me, I could go on and on for ages, so bear with me!

I've never sent a quilt off to be professionally quilted yet as I enjoy the quilting bit and believe it's part of the whole process (plus I don’t like paying!). But I'll never say never and if you have a huge king size quilt then hauling that through your sewing machine can be hard work.


I just use my normal sewing machine. For this one I free-motioned stitched (drop my feed dogs, use my embroidery foot and move my quilt to 'draw') the star in the centre and just kept echoing it. Then I free-motioned the seashell kind of filler around it. I did mark some of the star lines as they got bigger to attempt to keep them straight, but I don't mark fillers, they are all free hand.

For the seashell filler I start at an edge and stitch an oval shape, then I bounce back around that shape, finishing where I first started. Then I bounce around and around that shape and then I start a new shape from where I finished the old one.

This picture is the pattern drawn in pen with the first two shapes having directional arrows on them to show you how I stitched them. I started in the bottom right corner.  It’s easier to see it done than look at pictures and if you have a look at Leah Day’s blog, you can see videos of her stitching her filler patterns. I’m sure she probably has one very similar to the one I’ve used but I originally started using this pattern after reading one of Robbi-Joy Eklow’s books.

And be careful if you do start making quilts, it’s very, very addictive!