Feather Practice, Part 5

This post is a fifth in my Feather Practice Series, and today, I share how I do my Asian-inspired feathers and spine variations.  These designs work great on Asian themed quilts, tropical quilts, and nature quilts and similar themed quilt top designs.

featherpractice5.pdf   (right click to download.  You will need Adobe Reader to view the file)

Feather Practice 5.1 by Carla Barrett

Feather Practice 5.2 by Carla Barrett

Print out and practice on 5-10 copies. Repetition is how you learn how to draw any feather type.   Practice drawing them and filling a variety of quilt spaces, too,

Freehand quilters: I suggest you mark until you can quilt this design by memory.  Now, when I quilt them free motion,   I will only mark the spine as a guideline.

I hope you are enjoying my Feather Practice Series.  If so, please leave me a comment.  My motivation for providing this free series is to provide assistance to any machine quilters who needs encouragement in their own personal quilting journey.   Happy Quilting, Carla Barrett

How to quilt Various Feathers, etc.

Want to make lovely feather motifs like this one?

I decided to write  a simple “how-to” for quilting basic feather types.  This post is also for the students in my class yesterday who had questions about simple feathers, “continuous curve” quilting, and how I would quilt a wedding ring quilt.  If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, you will see the difference between a feathered “flurry” quilt and a “feathered meander.”

Here is my simple tutorial for drawing and quilting freehand feathers:

Ever struggle with your feather shape?  Here is a helpful page to print out and practice. HInt- if you print it out and laminate the page, you can practice with dry erase pens over and over:

Here’s my how-to for Heirloom Feathers:

Here is the order for the Continuous Curve quilting in a 9-patch:

I also mentioned the Wedding ring quilt on my table at the moment- and how I take photos of the quilt and send suggestions to the friend who owns it. Suzie, this is relevant for you since you will be teaching a Wedding Ring class. Here are the 4 suggestions I drew for this friend:

The first two examples are stencil inspiration, the last two are my own drawings and ideas. My friend, the quilt’s owner picked #2, by the way, so I am busy implementing it. See the finished quilt here:

(Click on for larger view)

I also mentioned a technique called, “The Flurry,” a design created by my good pal, Jamie Wallen (thanks Jamie!). Flurrying a quilt is fast when you have the design down pat. Here is what is looks like quilted on a quilt:

If I were to draw it out, it would look like this:

Here is what Megan Best spine method looks like used on a quilt:

and the back:

I do hope this is helpful for all you beginning quilting students our there! Happy Quilting!

Regards, Carla

PS: Here is the link for the finished wedding ring quilt shown above. Some other great posts about quilting are shown here and here.