Machine Quilting Around Decorative Stitches - Light Spiral Pattern with Leah Day

Hello my quilting friends, my name is Leah Day and I have this awesome
little test quilt here on my Eversewn Celine sewing machine, and I want to test and see what free motion quilting filters look like with our decorative stitches.

So I've been doing lots of swatching with our Decorative Stitch Swatcher,
playing with stitch length and width to come up with some designs that look really good quilted on my quilt.

That means I actually stitch through all three layers coming out the back.
You can see it on the back. And I did this with a walking foot. I have a short little video if you want to check that out, just some quick little tips because it's very, very easy to do.

I just crossed my lines, and I didn't worry about stopping and not overlapping. If that bothered you, I figured you could just so a button
or a little circle appliques something on top of that, but I think it looks perfectly fine.

So now I have these six inch spaces and I want to play with this and try free machine quilting fillers stitched inside of these. I might even play with some ruler quilting too. I just feel like this is giving us a great opportunity
to play with different designs and see what how it works.

So I'm going to pull up thread here and then I'll zoom in so that way we can quilt our light spiral design together. So Light Spiral is a very simple design. We're going to swirl into a spiral shape and then we're going to create a circle in the center and then travel, stitch our way back out again.
A lot of travel stitching with this design. That doesn't mean that we have to travel stitch with all free machine quilting designs. It's just the rule for this particular design.

Now I'm going to swing into another spiral shape, swirling around and then forming that circle. Now, if you want to, you could build up thread,
you could spin around and around and around if you wanted to, but I just like to form that circle and then travel, stitch my way just a little distance away before I swirl into my next spiral shape and make sure my needle is ending in the down position. It's just a habit. I like it always to end in the down position.

So that way the quilt doesn't move while I'm shifting my hands around.
There we go. I've got another little circle and then I want to fill in this
whole corner and move up to my next row. So you can see how I stitch
this across the quilt, the square in a row, more or less. And then I stitch down and form another row, kind of nesting it together with the other one. So think of it form a small white spiral here.

There we go. Don't worry about which way the spiral is spinning. The key here, I think with the decorative stitches, we kind of just have to watch out with getting too close to them. Like you don't want to travel, stitch along them or anything because it would be impossible to travel, stitch along something that looks like that, right?

We want to give a little bit of a buffer around those decorative stitches.
I think that's going to make it look nice. Let the decorative stitches be kind of the border of the block, and that kind of changes things a little bit where you don't really have a ditch. You can stitch in like you don't have an edge or a border that you could base your design off of. For that reason, I think designs like Light Spiral are going to work really well. This is a design you can see.

I can just flow around forming these shapes swirling into my next spiral.
And you can see I don't have to touch those edges. I don't have to travel stitch against that in order to get to the next area of my design. Other free motion floating designs are very differently though, so you just have to kind of take a look at it and figure out what's going to work for you and also which designs are going to work best.

And that's really the point of this whole test just to see what's going to work best. So this is a very, very fun design. It's very it's flowing very, very quickly. Even though there's some travel stitching involved.

Don't hesitate to put your foot down while you are stitching the spiral,
but you definitely want to slow down a little bit as you're doing that
travel stitching so you can actually hear that as I put my foot down and really give it some gas and I increased my speed while making that initial spiral and the circle shape.

And then I slow down and I don't have a stitch regulator whenever my machine is stationary, you know, down in a table that's just my foot on the foot pedal with that level of control. And that just comes with practice and time. So the more you stitch like spiral, the better you're going to get
at controlling the speed of your sewing machine.

So there we go. We stitch several rows of light spiral, and I think that looks great. We have a little bit of a buffer between the design and the decorative stitches. I think that's a great way to quilt your quilts with both types of designs, a little bit of free motion, a little bit of decorative stitching.

So make sure to check out my next video. We're going to do a little ruler quilting next to give ourselves that edge. What's next in this series? Ruler Quilting! Just in case we wanted to quilt a different style of design.

If you like to follow along, come and check out all of these different
fun tutorials at LeahDay.com/Decorate