How to Free Motion Quilt Fiery Comet Flower with Leah Day
Looking for a new free motion quilt design? Then you've come to the right place. Today Leah Day walks you through free motion quilting a Fiery Comet Flower design on her home sewing machine.
Instructor
Leah Day
Leah Day is an online quilting teacher and founded LeahDay.com in 2009. She teaches quilting online via free YouTube videos and is also a dealer for Grace longarm machines and frames. Her mission is to empower and encourage quilters of all skill levels learn to make beautiful quilts.
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Common Questions
What is covered in How to Free Motion Quilt Fiery Comet Flower with Leah Day?
Looking for a new free motion quilt design? Then you've come to the right place. Today Leah Day walks you through free motion quilting a Fiery Comet Flower design on her home sewing machine.
How long is the tutorial video?
The tutorial video is 00:03:50.
Are supplies listed for this tutorial?
Yes. The tutorial page includes the supplies and materials connected to this project.
Is a transcript available?
Yes. A written transcript is available on the tutorial page.
Video Transcript
Hello my quilting friends! My name is Leah Day and welcome to this free motion quilting tutorial for fiery comet flower.
So this design starts with a circle of circles. And I did mark a circle in the
center just so that way I would form a nice circular shape. Okay I just wanted to see how many times I can use the word circle at the beginning.
All right, so I used a bunsen burner ceramic marking pencil to mark my circle in the center. You can find the marking pens that I like best at leahday.com. Some marking pens are not, they're not all created equal, let's just put it that way. And I have been burned before, so I'm very very careful about what I use and recommend.
So the very first step is to mark your center circle and then to stitch a nice even ring of circles around it. And I'm just eyeballing this, filling these in, and then travel stitching around to where I can fill in this last one. And the nice thing is once you get to the last one, then you can clearly see okay it's got to fill in that entire space. There we go, that looks great.
Okay I've decided to leave the center empty and blank here and we're going to turn all of these circles into fiery comets. And this is another
design within the free mission quilting project. You can just do a google search for Leah Day Fiery Comet to watch that other video. It's fairly old, but it's still definitely a great tutorial.
So you can see how to stitch this by itself. So I had a little bit of a thread break and I took a break there. So now we're gonna get back to it and this is basically a ring of fiery comets. That's another design that I've stitched for the free motion quilting project. Basically it starts out with a circle shape and then you branch out with this big kind of flame shape. So you branch out, come back and then you fill in that space with internal echoes. So that's just an echo to the inside of the flame shape, swirl in swirl out,
back and forth.
Now watch out - I have done some travel stitching along the outside of these circles which means that there's a lot of thread building up. Whenever you hear this kind of pocking noise with your needle, kind of hit it a few times slowly. You just want to go like this: I'm tapping my foot pedal and I can needle up needle down with each foot petal tap and that's really helpful for stuff like this. Because when you start to build up your thread too much, you could definitely get a thread break. So watch out for that.
So again swirl out with my flame shape, swing inside with my internal echoes. And you can see just how cute this is going to be. Now this is very
very similar to another design called earth flower. The only difference is I'm actually going to go into the background here and I'm going to continue to fill in this space. So I would continue to go all the way around the entire, all of the circles and fill in with my fiery comments first.
Right here, I'm going to go ahead and escape and come down here travel stitch over. Now I'm going to fill in this background with just more echoes, just travel stitching along the edge of my quilting space, then stitching inside and just echoing that. I overshot right there and accidentally hit my line of quilting because I couldn't really see what I was doing. Whenever you can't see, you can't quilt very well. So just rotate your quilting sandwich around so that way you can see what you're doing clearly. There we go! You can see just how beautiful that texture is going to look. It's going to fill up your quilt with this really beautiful free-flowing design.
So this design starts with a circle of circles. And I did mark a circle in the
center just so that way I would form a nice circular shape. Okay I just wanted to see how many times I can use the word circle at the beginning.
All right, so I used a bunsen burner ceramic marking pencil to mark my circle in the center. You can find the marking pens that I like best at leahday.com. Some marking pens are not, they're not all created equal, let's just put it that way. And I have been burned before, so I'm very very careful about what I use and recommend.
So the very first step is to mark your center circle and then to stitch a nice even ring of circles around it. And I'm just eyeballing this, filling these in, and then travel stitching around to where I can fill in this last one. And the nice thing is once you get to the last one, then you can clearly see okay it's got to fill in that entire space. There we go, that looks great.
Okay I've decided to leave the center empty and blank here and we're going to turn all of these circles into fiery comets. And this is another
design within the free mission quilting project. You can just do a google search for Leah Day Fiery Comet to watch that other video. It's fairly old, but it's still definitely a great tutorial.
So you can see how to stitch this by itself. So I had a little bit of a thread break and I took a break there. So now we're gonna get back to it and this is basically a ring of fiery comets. That's another design that I've stitched for the free motion quilting project. Basically it starts out with a circle shape and then you branch out with this big kind of flame shape. So you branch out, come back and then you fill in that space with internal echoes. So that's just an echo to the inside of the flame shape, swirl in swirl out,
back and forth.
Now watch out - I have done some travel stitching along the outside of these circles which means that there's a lot of thread building up. Whenever you hear this kind of pocking noise with your needle, kind of hit it a few times slowly. You just want to go like this: I'm tapping my foot pedal and I can needle up needle down with each foot petal tap and that's really helpful for stuff like this. Because when you start to build up your thread too much, you could definitely get a thread break. So watch out for that.
So again swirl out with my flame shape, swing inside with my internal echoes. And you can see just how cute this is going to be. Now this is very
very similar to another design called earth flower. The only difference is I'm actually going to go into the background here and I'm going to continue to fill in this space. So I would continue to go all the way around the entire, all of the circles and fill in with my fiery comments first.
Right here, I'm going to go ahead and escape and come down here travel stitch over. Now I'm going to fill in this background with just more echoes, just travel stitching along the edge of my quilting space, then stitching inside and just echoing that. I overshot right there and accidentally hit my line of quilting because I couldn't really see what I was doing. Whenever you can't see, you can't quilt very well. So just rotate your quilting sandwich around so that way you can see what you're doing clearly. There we go! You can see just how beautiful that texture is going to look. It's going to fill up your quilt with this really beautiful free-flowing design.
