Quilting on Your Home Sewing Machine - Leaves and Spirals Pattern with Leah Day

Hello, my quilting friends. My name is Leah Day. And today we are stitching, leaves and spirals.

So this starts out with a leaf shape. Go inside, stitch a little wiggly line.
You can think of that as a snake shape or a vine shape or a stem shape.
Whatever. Whatever metaphor works for you. And then you're going to swirl out into a open spirals stitch in and then leave yourself space to get back out again.

So once you stitch a leaf and then a spiral stitch another leaf, it's a really fun, freeform design and it can just flow around your quilts. And as you can see, I'm stitching this on a slightly larger scale than usual. So this is going to be a great design to use as an all over quilting filler design.
Take this and stitch it all over your quilt in all directions. It's going to be able to fill in those areas and be a really quick finish with a very beautiful texture.

Now, as you can see, I am stitching this on my little decorative stitch sampler. I have stitched lots of decorative stitches here in lines and that form the outline of my blocks. And it's kind of fun because not only am I able to play with decorative stitch quilting, I've also been able to play with which filler designs work really well when stitched around those decorative stitches because some designs don't work like that.

Some of the designs really need an edge in order to kind of travel stitch along it. But this leaves and spirals design is one where it's just flowing through the space by itself. I'm able to stitch it in rows.

As you can see here, I'm able to wiggle into that space and fill in that area with that leaf shape, but I don't necessarily need to travel, stitch along those edges to fill in the design and not leave any gaps behind.

So now let's try leaves and spirals in a different way with a home sewing machine on a frame. So this is a very different quilting set up before we were pushing the quilt on a table. In that case, it's a stationary home sewing machine set up this case. We are moving the machine over the quilt. It's a lot more like drawing on a piece of paper because the machine,
the needle itself is moving over the quilt and it's a little bit more like drawing.

So in this situation and quilting on the frame, I have a cut handles above upgrade that make my handles above the quilt and I'm using a speed controller to control my speed. That sets my machine to run at a steady, constant speed. It is not a regulator, so I kind of have to try and maintain the same steady speed as they stitch this.

I've already gotten a little bit of practice in and I can tell you that can be a challenge because the spirals and the leaf shapes are very, very easy to quilt. What ends up happening is my stitch link just gets really, really long.
So I need to be careful to maintain a nice, slow, steady speed. And that way my stitches maintain the same consistent size. A little bit of practice, a little bit of effort, but it really works out great.

So let's give leaves and spirals a try on this very different quilting setup.
In this case, I've got my home sewing machine set up on the Cutie Frame, and I am moving the machine in this case, not the quilt. And I'm just trying to maintain that nice, consistent design flowing through this area.
This is the chain of beads, quills and, you know, maintaining that same set of steps. So first stitch a leaf shape, go inside, then stitch a spiral. In this case, I'm going to stitch a second spiral because that'll be the perfect way to fill in that little corner.

Now, you'll notice that my machine is running at a steady, constant pace. I'm using a speed controller in this case. Now, because of that, I kind of want to maintain just a smooth movement. You know, I'm just trying to maintain the same smooth movement throughout. rther than speeding up or slowing down.

I'll show you what happens if I speed up to see my stitches. They end up getting longer because my machine's running at one steady pace. If I speed up the movement, my stitches are going to get really long. So it's not a stitch regulator.

I kind of had to just be careful about my movement and just focus on making those shapes and maintaining that speed. It's a lot to think about, but it's so easy. It's so it feels so easy in my body to be moving the machine versus pushing the quilt. So in this area, I'm just flowing with the design.

I'm putting it on a fairly big scale here, but of course I could quilt it even bigger if I needed to just try and make a really big spiral shape, swirl inside and then swirl out. You can see I filled in that whole area with just that one spiral shape, and that's going to make the quilt softer. It's also going to fill the quilt faster.

So very good advantages for quilting, bigger shapes on your yourself.
And as you can see, leaves in spirals is a great design to do that. And now I've got a little weird area, so let's see how we can stitch it swirling.
With a spiral like that. Now, maybe a leaf shape to fill in this area. Make that nice and chunky. There we go. Give it a little bit of a fine line on the inside, and then I think I can just finish this off with a nice spiral shape,
swirl in and swirl back out. I am really happy with how that turned out.

But, you know, I might want to just touch down in here with one more little leaf shape, and I think that's going to look great, too. So this is really a perfect design to fill in anywhere in your quilts. It's just really going to flow in and be a great all over bed fill.