Step-by-Step Free-Motion Quilting

Christina Cameli is a nurse, midwife, and quilter who enjoys finishing quilts on her domestic machine in addition to teaching free-motion quilting classes for beginners. She lives with her husband and children in Portland, Oregon, and shares her adventures in patchwork and quilting at AFewScraps.blogspot.com.

March 2015There are a lot of books on free-motion quilting and the ones that C&T publish are consistently good. If you feel you have seen it all before, this book takes a slightly different approach and there are over 80 designs that spring from nine ‘elements’. These are combined and recombined to give endless possibilities. The ‘elements’ are circle, curvy lines, loops, drops, spirals, leaves, ‘s’ curves, arcs and grass. A brief description of each is given with diagrams and written instructions of how tosew them. This is a good foundation for moving onto the more complex designs but before you get to those, there are some considerations that are mapped out for you, which look at the practical aspects of these free-motion motifs. Considered here are the way the stitches will work together across a length of fabric. These tips are useful for planning out what kind of pattern you would want to see emerge on your work. The designs themselves are well laid out. Again, you have useful diagrams to show the initial pattern, how to expand on it and what it will look like on a larger scale. The latter is shown on a full-sized page and this is particularly useful, especially when you are encouraged to photocopy these and doodle onto them to create a hands-on practice of a design. A lot of the ease of free-motion pattern stitching comes from being able to get into the flow of onemotif to another and this suggestion is of great benefit to the reader to get their brain workingbefore starting to sew. It’s a great book for getting you to look beyond some of the more traditional stitches you might stick to and to think about how you can adapt these basic stitches to create something more personal.

• Introduction The Elements Things to Know The Designs Afterword