When I am freehand quilting, my goal is to make from one side of the quilt to the other without starting and stopping, if at all possible. I will backtrack, echo or travel to get from one design to the next.
Think about a string of peals. Circles that are touching would seem to be a natural continuous line. But they are not. There are many different ways that we can make them continuous, like backtracking part of a circle to get to the next one or doing all the tops of the circles and then doing the bottoms on the way back across the quilts A circle stops and starts on the same point. And we really need to stop on the other side to do the next circle.
As I starting designing a string of circles today, I started by doing two 50 sided polygons. I realized my mistake immediately. I need them to join, so I switched to arcs. And I did the top of the arcs for my short sample and then did the bottoms. This worked right up until the point I took it into Pantostacker and tried to join two of them together. It just was not pretty.
I stopped and really thought about how I would quilt this design which caused a light bulb moment. My whole idea is centered around a modern quilt that I need to quilt. If I am going modern anyway, why do I feel like I need to have a string of circles. I could add a travel line to the center and not only make my life easier, but it would also go with the modern feel. Staying with the two arc circle, this time I made the single circle and then added a Spline from the where the first circle started to where I wanted to start the second circle.
This post first appeared on www.threadwaggle.com
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