Fleur Drive Digital Pantograph Quilting Design

Meet Fleur Drive. It's got a sweet sophistication that'll add a touch of class to your next quilt top.

The scalloped bottom edge of the motif has a beautiful way of integrating into the row below. One man's ceiling is another man's floor, as Paul Simon would say.

The stitching is simple and straight-forward. It does require every other row to be offset or staggered.

Here are my specifics using a baby-sized sample in the photos (45" x 50" quilt size):
Row height: 3"
Gap: -1.225"
Pattern height: 4.225" (distance from the top to bottom of the repeat)
Offset: 50%

I use an Intellquilter as my computer system, so your terms might differ. I can tell you I started with a pattern height at nearly 5" and it was too large of a scale for my taste... so I ripped out the first row and started again. Part of that might have been due to the scale in relation to this smallish quilt.

There's no backtracking with this design. It does require a 50% offset, or staggering every other row.

I would not recommend nesting the rows fully like with a clamshell shape. Give yourself some space as I've shown in the graphic at the top. You can also see the gap if you look closely at the sample pictures.

This way, you won't have to stress out about getting the points to match up perfectly. There's a bit of wiggle room just in case you have trouble realigning or if fabric draw causes the quilt to shrink inward.

I picked the name Fleur Drive because growing up in rural Iowa and listening to AM radio when I was young, I would always hear traffic reports from the big city (Des Moines) that included the East and West Mixmaster and Fleur Drive. Later in my life, I would end up living just off of Fleur Drive when I went to college. The middle motif of the quilting design reminded me of a fleur-de-lis and that's when I thought Fleur Drive would work as a name. 

If you use Fleur Drive on one of your projects, we'd love for you to use the hashtag #fleurdrivepanto and tag @longarmleague on Instagram so we can see what you're up to!