Court House Step Complementary Tints Quilt. 40.5 x 48.5 inches (Photo bombed by Waldorf doll Molly Mae)!
Here’s my Court House Steps color study quilt from my previous post.
I’ve done a number of quilts this year which I have quilted by echoing the blocks. It’s easy enough to quilt around the blocks on a small quilt with a walking foot, but I decided to do free motion quilting on this one.
I thought about putting a spiral or a loopy daisy flower in the green center block, both free-motion quilting designs I do a lot. But what else would work well? I took two books by Angela Walters off my shelf to see what inspiration I could find.
I found the four-petal leaf motif in Shape by Shape: Free-motion Quilting with Angela Walters in the chapter on Squares (and Rectangles). It’s Square 7 in the book. I don’t do well with free-motion straight lines and this design requires the quilter to “travel” along the edge of the block to get to the second side of the X. There is nothing precious about this quilt, so I decided to go for it! My traveling lines did improve as I quilted more of the blocks, but none of them are perfect. But you know what? This leaf design has a really organic feel and I like the the fact that all the quilting in that central block is slightly irregular. And I love that you can tell it was sewn by a person and wasn’t a computer driven design.
Still puzzled about how to quilt the bars around the central square I took a look at another of Angela Walter’s books, Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters. i haven’t looked at the book in years (published 2012) so I was pleasantly surprised to see a has a chapter on quilting Square-in-a-Square and Log Cabin quilts. And most of the log cabin quilts in the chapter have Court House Steps blocks. Perfect! She offered a number of suggestions but then I noticed one quilt with a bar that had a lazy cruved line with an occasional loop. I like loopy lines. And with swirls in Tula Pink’s “Measure Twice” fabric in my border, that struck the right cord. Angela only had an occasional loop in her quilted curve so mine is different because it is mostly loops!
Angela is well known for quilting every square inch in a quilt, but I like to leave open areas to let the quilt puff up a bit after it has been washed. So quilted all the hot pink bars and left the light pin bars open. There is straight line walking foot quilting around each of the Court House Step blocks, so everything really is tacked down adequately!
This was fun. And Molly Mae says she likes it!