Drinking the FMQ Koolaid, Part 2

A few days ago I shared my experiment with using Leah Day's free motion quilting designs on my Janome. 


As if that wasn't enough, I decided to quilt my Q4 UFO, Curvalishish, with a different FMQ design in every piece of fabric (except the borders and sashing). I started with Bubble Wand in the first border and it looked pretty bad. I went back later and added a little more stitching to take away some of the bobbles, but the second border with bubble wand is sooo much better. Of course, I did this one after quilting 50 different patterns! The fabric I used in this quilt was really busy and the backing is busy too, so there are a lot of places where the quilting didn't show up (thankfully!). Here are a few places where I could get a good picture: 


Matrix on the top, Sea Algae in the blue/green fabric that you can barely see. 

Chevron on the top, a poorly executed version of Gentle Flames on the bottom - and even though it doesn't look at all like Leah's, I like how it turned out!  

Bubble Wand in the border (the second try!): 

Here's the full quilt, and this picture is still full size, so you might be able to see a few of the designs if you click on it to open it full size. 

In general, I found doing any of the designs that called for echoing or even distance between lines really hard with the HQ. The pivoting designs and stem based designs were a little easier than some of the others. Over the course of the quilt, my pebbles/bubbles got a lot better. I am glad I tried it, and I was able to use almost all Beginner to Intermediate designs. I bypassed several on the first row or two that I came back to later! 


Hope you've enjoyed this little trip through the designs and I hope you will give at least a few of them a chance too!