The FMQ weekly: Wibbly Wobbly free-motion design

Do you see what I just did there, breezily claiming that I'll be posting about FMQ once a week? I love establishing grandiose plans just to see what happens. What probably will happen will be something like this. But let's just try it out anyway.

Today I want to teach you this quilting design and show you a video of it in action. I named it Wibbly Wobbly to thrill the Dr. Who nerds.

Only first I want to tell you a secret. When I was a kid, I used to try to chew equally on both sides of my mouth. Like, 2 marshmallows on the left, 2 marshmallows on the right, 1 on the left, 1 on the right, and so on. That, unfortunately, is not normal. I manage to get through my days now without hard-and-fast attention to my chewing, but I still have this brain that wants to focus on patterns all the time. So that's why I think this stuff up and how lucky am I that I have a blog where I can post it and make it look like I am doing work, instead of just suffering from a strange obsession. I guess what I'm saying is: without you, I look crazy. So thanks for reading.

Ok enough chit chat. What is awesome about this pattern is it has a lot of pebble-POW without having to actually cover the space with pebbling. Quilting with pebbling has a tendency to chew up bobbins and time. This is pebble impact in half the time.

The entire pattern is based on this shape:

If you make that shape back and forth down a whole column it would look like this:

If you squeeze them closer together you get this:

And if you can handle that then you can make this pattern just by changing the size of your circles!

I just use three sizes of circles. I make a couple large ones, a couple medium ones, a couple or three small ones, then a couple mediums and then do it again. You see how I change not only the size of the circle but how far out to the side it goes, which gives the column wavy sides.

After I make that first wavy-sided column (starting around the middle of my piece) then I come back alongside it with a new column. With this new column I still vary the small medium and large circles but I don't worry about keeping as strict of a pattern as I did with the first column, I just make sure that I fill in up to the edge of the previous column, and that I keep the other edge wavy. It's the wavy edges to the columns that keeps this looking really organic and forgiving of errors. So pay attention to keeping your free edge wavy instead of trying to keep a rigid pattern going.

So, would you like to see me stitching it? Awesome, because I filmed over six minutes of that. This video has no narration because the toddler was napping in the adjacent room and I love you, but not enough to wake up a sleeping kid by yammering about free motion quilting. Also, I had to put my iPad on some books to film it so when you see me raising my wrist really awkwardly it's because I haven't perfected that setup yet and the books were in my way.

Let me know if you like the no-narration video thing. I can definitely do more of those!

As with all free-motion designs please give yourself the gift of doodling them first before you get your sewing machine involved. You'll be glad you did! And of course I'd love to hear how it goes if you use this design on your quilt. Happy stitching!