I was really excited to take a class with Angela Walters last Saturday. I come across her name online regularly, and when I was browsing photos from Quiltcon, I also noticed that she did the quilting on a LOT of quilts in the show.
The class covered what she calls her “dot to dot” method. It’s free motion quilting, but with straight lines so it turned out to be the perfect thing for me to try since I’ve never done free motion before (other than a couple very, very brief practice attempts).
I’m going to share my practice sandwiches from the class — as long as everyone promises not to make fun of my wonky lines and uneven stitches! Are we agreed? Ok!
The first thing Angela went over was the diamond pattern. I stitched the squares as a reference, since you’d normally be quilting within a block or something similar, and then got to work. The smaller two squares on the left are the “basic” diamond shape. The one on the right is a slightly more complicated design that uses diamonds in each quadrant and would be good for larger blocks.
After that, we moved on to the starburst pattern. I really like this one, and as you can see, you can modify it to work in both squares and triangles.The basic pattern is on the lower left. One simple modification is on the upper left, and a more complicated but very cool modification for a triangle is on the right.
Finally we worked on applying the dot-to-dot concept to borders. I’ve never actually made a quilt with a traditional border but it was still fun to practice. This was towards the end of class and I started to get sloppy with my stitching — well, I mean sloppier than things already were before.
One thing I noticed is that while a lot of the other people sewed continuously, I would sew a line segment, stop at a corner, then sew the next line segment, and so on. So while practicing my borders, I also tried not stopping at each corner and just shifting the direction I moved the fabric. It is certainly faster to sew that way, but while I am still learning I think I am much (MUCH) more accurate and can maintain straighter lines if I pause before switching direction.
All in all it was a really fun class, and I’d recommend any classes with Angela if you have the opportunity to take one. She was a great instructor and super friendly as well! While a 3-hour class didn’t give me quite enough confidence to attempt free motion on a quilt I intend to give to anyone just yet, I know that with more practice I’ll get there!
