Quilting with Moxie: Filling Large Spaces

Transcript:

Hi I'm Beth and this video is brought to you by Handi Quilter and the Moxie machine. I'm working on a quilt that has some really large open spaces. That can be really intimidating to fill with quilting, especially when you're just getting started. I'm going to share some easy designs that you can scale up to fill those in.

Remember those "es" and "ls" from our last video? I think they look great here in the large triangles.

Another easy way to fill a shape is to echo into the center and then come back out. Just be sure to leave some room between the lines so you have space to travel back out from the center. Trying to quilt a straight line diagonally is pretty challenging, so just think of it as a wonky triangle.

I've quilted some of my triangles and now I'm ready to quilt the center block. It's a really large block and it doesn't fit within the throat space of the machine, so I'll have to tackle it in sections. So this is where some marking is going to be really helpful. I'm going to create a petal design that goes out from the corners and into the center and back out. So I'm going to measure to find the center and make a mark, now measuring from the other side. I've got my center marked and I need to also mark the center of the sides.

Start at the top and gently curve to the center point, then pause and stop if you need to, make a loop and hit the next mark on the side, back to the center, make a loop, and then back out the edge. This is as far as we can go for now. Now we'll do the same thing on the other side.

Then we can go right into our blue triangle. We're going up and making a loop in the center, a curve to the point of the triangle, and a curve back to where we started.

Time for another one of our echo in and outs on this yellow triangle.

If you want your center design to stand out a little bit more, you can add some dense quilting in the negative space around it. When you add dense quilting to a section, it really flattens that section out and the part that has less dense quilting will appear to pop up.

If you're looking for design ideas, Handi Quilter has great resources on their website and YouTube channel. I especially like the Minute Motif series that show a design in about a minute! These even include a pdf download so you can trace the pattern with your finger to get a feel for the travel path of stitching it and are also handy to keep next to your machine for reference while you're quilting.

Be bold, be creative, and quilt with Moxie! Learn more at HandiQuilter.com/Moxie.