Variation on continuous curve quilting

Quilters love using continuous curve quilting as an easy, effective, and aesthetically pleasing way to quilt within patchwork shapes without having to mark lines.   It’s similar to how hand quilters would use outline quilting to quilt 1/4" inside a patchwork shape.  For machine quilting that would mean a lot of starts and stops and we avoid that like the plague.  So the continuous curve method was developed as a way for machine quilters to outline by gently bridging our quilting lines from one corner of patchwork to another continuously.  Here’s an example (kids, I broke out the straight edge and Cars crayons for this one!):

In the above example, the black ink represents the quilting lines within each patch.

So jump forward with me to that Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt I’m working on now, remember?  Well, almost all of the traditional Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilts that I’ve seen in the past use traditional outline hand-quilting within each hexagon.  I kept that tradition in mind as I began planning the quilting for this quilt.  I thought about using the continuous curve method.  And then I remembered a technique I came up with about a year ago where I inserted a little loop mid-way in each arc and decided to use it again for this Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt.

Here’s a few pictures of the quilting so far:

  Here’s a step-by-step:

And here it is all together within a Grandmother’s Flower Garden patch:

In the above example, the black ink represents where to start the quilting, the red ink shows the transition (without breaking thread) to the next series of arcs with loops.  I end the quilting after the 24th arc (shown in red ink) and restart at #1 in purple ink – although for the sake of not stopping, one could track back in the seam or over the previous quilting lines to get to the next start point.  After the 18th arc (shown in purple ink) I would keep going around the next series of hexagons.

To reiterate, I would use the same thread for the whole thing, using different colors in the diagram helps me visually show this technique. 

Also, I’m not going to claim I’m the first or only one to do this.  I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but lots of quilters use this continuous curve technique, so it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that someone else would have varied it in the same way as I’ve shown.

I like it because these arcs and loops – back to back – form a secondary design, it’s applicable to nearly any kind of patchwork, and best of all – NO MARKING!

So add this idea to your bag of quilting tricks and try something new!