Building Blocks of Free-Motion Quilting

Kathleen Riggins has been sewing for as long as she can remember and hanging out at her parents&; store, Quilting from the Heart, in Camrose, Alberta, Canada. She has taught longarm quilting and free-motion quilting all over the world. Visit kathleenquilts.com

If you’ve got free-motion quilting basics sorted but you want to know how to combine them, then this is the book for you!The book is split into 5 sections: an introduction/setting it up section, a basic designs section, a building combinations section, a making shapes section and a finishing up section!How super stylish is the layout of the contents too?! This stylish layout runs throughout the book and it is sublime!In the intro/setting up sections, Kathleen talks you through needles, sewing space, basting, marking, and securing your thread at the beginning and end. Once the setting up is covered, you can start learning the 8 free-motion quilting designs that are the foundation of this book: straight lines, grids, feathers, bubbles, swirls, clamshells, wave fills and ribbon candy.I love how there are tips for areas that the quilting design works particularly well in!The instructions for the quilting design are a combination of visuals (digital diagrams and real-life photos) and writing.In the following section, Kathleen then begins to guide you through the process of combining these different designs! Scary, yes, but also very exciting and that excitement is because the photos are so beautiful!Again, the instructions for combining the designs are a combination of written text, digital diagrams and real-life photos which help to make the process more accessible. I also love how Kathleen includes, again, the areas on a quilt that the combination would work well in!The penultimate section looks at using quilting to draw attention to, or away from, shapes on your quilt.The final section of the book covers troubleshooting, removing marks and these FABULOUS building block cards! These are cards you can cut out to keep alongside your machine to act as visual representations of the different quilting (and to see what the combination of quilting designs would look like!)