How to Free Motion Quilt Heart Lines with Leah Day

Hello my quilting friends! My name is Leah Day and welcome to this free motion quilting tutorial for heart lines.

So this design is stitched from edge to edge across your quilting space. And as you can see I first stitched some wiggly lines and I leave a gap. That gap can just really depend on how wide of spacing, how big of a amount of space that you want for your hearts. In this case I'm leaving about a half of
an inch of space. But you know if you're working on a bigger quilt obviously that could be two or three inches wide. It really just depends on how big you want the hearts and how much you want those to stand out on your quilt.

So within that gap I start filling my hearts, just stitching up, swirling inside, bouncing over, travel stitching up and then swirling into another heart. Very, very quick and simple. This is one of those designs that came out of
designing lovely border. I started thinking of more ways that I can play with hearts on my quilt. And I just really really love this. I think this is going to be great in a border. It could also work in sashing - it just really depends on how much quilting you want to do on your quilt.

Now once you fill in your hearts, that little gappy space with your hearts,
you're going to do some echoing. And it really just depends on how you
want it to look. One line of echoing is going to look very like a focus on the hearts more than anything else. Then if you do more lines of echoing, like I'm doing two or three, then that's going to be a little bit less of a focus on the hearts and a little bit more focus on just the overall texture of the design.

You can also vary the width of your gap areas. You can make those come in and be more narrow. In this case, I want my hearts to be filling so that they go from one direction to the other direction. So if ever you want to just bounce around to the opposite side, you can do that and then you're always filling your hearts from a different angle. I kind of like that. I think that works really really well.

Okay so that is how heart lines works - that's how you quilt it!