Featherweight Digital Quilting Design

I love feathers. 

I took my first quilting class in 2005. Not a piecing class, an honest-to-goodness beginner's machine quilting class that taught things like which materials to use, how to baste, and how to {start to} free-motion quilt.

In that class, we saw examples of real-life quilts that had been quilted. Our instructor passed around even more books of incredibly inspiring quilting. I fell for hard for feathers right then and there!

This was also the class where I heard ladies talking about long arms and I just nodded along, not having any idea about what that could be referring to. 😂

Basically, I've loved feathers ever since, in all kinds of iterations. I practiced drawing and quilting them until I got it down pat. I started out being truly the worst at it! It's not a natural thing—knowing how to create feathery shapes. Thank goodness for books and (much later) YouTube! 

As for this design, I wanted to make minimalistic-looking, plump feathers that are easy to stitch out. I think it fits the bill!

To set this design up, you'll want to offset every other row at 50% and close the gap between rows until you like the amount of spacing between. 

This sample quilt size is approximately 45" x 45". For reference in scaling this design, the pictures show the stitching at the default row height of 4". If you include the gaps between the rows, the total pattern height would be 4.301". That would mean that the gap amount is -0.301".  I use an Intelliquilter to stitch out my designs, so your terms might be a bit different. 

I like the little circles that connect the shapes. It reminds me of Scandanavian design. 

You can watch the video at the top of this post to see the stitch path. There is some backtracking on the feather bumps, but it's not too bad.

I could see this edge-to-edge design working really well on modern quilts, kid quilts or quilts with a floral theme.

If you use this design, we'd love for you to use the hashtag #featherweightpanto and tag @longarmleague so we can see what you're up to!