FITF: leaf quilting – a tutorial

I know I’ve mentioned about nine thousand times already know how much I love Elizabeth’s dogwood quilting pattern. Lately I’ve been wanting to quilt every quilt I make with this pattern, but in the interest in keeping a little variety in my life (not to mention a little variety for this old blog!) I’ve been playing around with the design a bit to achieve slightly different looks.

For my recent Fall Cross quilt I thought a leaf pattern would go well, so I adjusted the dogwood pattern a bit to add the veins of a leaf within each petal arc. Want to try it? Here’s a series of quick drawings showing how this was quilted. (If you haven’t tried Elizabeth’s pattern yet, I highly recommend you do that first, then come back and try this variation!)

First you’ll need to draw a grid of squares on your quilt. For my Fall quilt I used a 2″ square grid. I use a washable marker to draw out the grid, but feel free to use your preferred method of marking!

This is a free motion quilting pattern, quilted in columns starting from the bottom of the quilt and quilting up one column of the grid to the top of the quilt.

Starting from either bottom corner of the square, quilt an arc up to the opposite corner of the square, then quilt another arc back down to your starting point.

Starting from that same point, quilt the series of ‘veins’ through the center of the leaf. You’ll want to quilt outwards from the center of the leaf out to each side (though not all the way to the edge of the leaf) and then back along that line back to the center line. Continue making these little veins throughout the leaf.

When you reach the top of the leaf, then you’ll continue the same way, alternating the direction of the leaves. In the photo above, the arc for the second leaf would start from the bottom left corner and go to the top right, then back down to the bottom left corner.

Continue up the row to the top of the quilt.