Happy Weekend, fellow quilt lovers! I have been finishing a lot more quilts than blog posts over the past few months and it has created a backlog of unshared photos on my camera roll. Today I'm sharing four different clients' quilts that I quilted with four different allover feather quilting designs, with a brief discussion of how the design, thread, and batting choices were selected for each quilt. Here's a quick glimpse of the four quilts I'll be talking about today, made by my clients Janita, Paula, Mildred, and Nanette, and quilted by Yours Truly:
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| Clockwise from Top Left: Feathers and Pearls I, Angel Wings, Abundant Feathers, Fast Feathers |
Janita's Flying Geese Sampler: Abundant Feathers
Janita chose the Abundant Feathers quilting design for her cheerful flying geese sampler quilt (I don't have the name of her quilt pattern but if anyone recognizes it, please let me know and I'll update the post accordingly). I just love the playful energy of her color palette of red, pink and aqua against a crisp white background!
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| Janita's 70 x 87 Flying Geese Sampler with Abundant Feathers E2E |
Abundant Feathers is a very versatile design that looks good on a lot of different quilts from modern to traditional or reproduction quilts. There is extensive backtracking/overstitching in this design, which is why I recommended lightweight So Fine 50 wt matte polyester quilting thread in Pearl (this post contains affiliate links). With a thin thread like So Fine, your eye isn't drawn to the double-stitched quilting lines, and on a quilt like this one that has high contrast between the background and pieced block fabrics, skinny So Fine thread will seem to "take on" the color of the fabric it's stitching across, appearing like a pale pink against the red fabric and pale blue against the aqua. A thicker white or cream thread would not have blended into the darker fabrics that way. We wanted to keep the focus on the variety of pieced blocks and fabrics in Janita's sampler quilt, with the feather quilting playing more of a supporting role. One more thing to notice about Abundant Feathers is how evenly spaced the quilting is across the surface of the quilt with this design, compared to some of the other feather designs we'll be looking at in today's post. That's something to think about when choosing between similar quilting designs, whether you prefer a balanced overall texture like Abundant Feathers or whether you want to see some variety between the more open feather parts of a design verses the denser details of pearls, echoes, etc.
