Progressive Detail Quilting

I’ve been inspired by several talented machine quilters over the past few years since I began my journey – Natalia Bonner, Angela Walters, Sharon Blackmore, Judi Madsen, to name a few! – and when I’m working on a quilt using techniques I’ve gleaned from a particular video or class I always like to mention it as part of my story about the quilt 🙂

As I’ve said many times before, we all put our own personal spin on things as we progress with our free motion quilting and develop our own style, and the projects we make will show a combination of ideas that we’ve gathered along the way.  This quilt is a good example of that.

The most recent class I was attracted to is Judi Madsen’s Progressive Detail Quilting class on iQuilt.com.  I love the way Judi sets up a secondary design in the background areas of her quilts and I’ve admired her style for long enough that I decided to get some direct instruction and basic planning inspiration by taking her class.  So when it came time to quilt this Modern Plus Sign quilt (pattern by Missouri Star Quilt Company) I was ready to put some of it to work.

When you look at the overall effect, you might or might not notice differences between this and other densely quilted projects I’ve shared, but I’ve definitely incorporated some of the planning and ideas she uses to create cool geometric sections with ease.  I still did lots of this in the moment – as opposed to marking the whole quilt top before I started – but the class really helped with expanding my vision of what could happen in the negative space.

And of course, even the back looks cool with designs like this!

I’m super happy with how this turned out and I am again in a quandary about whether or not to keep it! LOL

Check out the links below to videos I posted over on my Youtube channel at various points while I was working on this quilt.  The first has no sound, just stitching.  The others show some of my planning.  Enjoy!