Free Motion for Beginners – Lazy S

If you practiced the Red Hot Hearts design from last week, you worked really hard. So you deserve a break this week. That Red Hot Hearts design takes good control of your machine and lots of brain power and guidelines to keep the pattern going right. Did you think of a mantra to use to help you? If you’re not sure how mantras and quilting go together read this previous post. We will learn some easy, free-flowing, no-guidelines-needed designs this week, using a lazy S, rather than the very-good-penmanship S we used last week. It will be like a walk in the park!

Grass

Speaking of parks, lets start with grass. This simple design works as an all-over texture design, or a background fill (when quilted smaller). It is especially nice in areas of quilts where you want to give the impression of grass. Like my elephant quilt, Don’t Forget Joe.

In the background toward the bottom of the quilt, I quilted grass. You might be able to see the stitching better on the back of the quilt.

I did use a contrasting thread (green) on the red fabric so the stitching shows there pretty well.

Grass looks like this.

Pick out the S shape

Can you see the lazy S shapes? One of the things you might be learning from this series of posts is to pick out which of the 5 basic shapes make up a quilting design.

When you get good at picking out those shapes, you’ll be able to quilt just about any design you see.

Lazy S

Why lazy? Well as you can see, these S shapes do not stand up straight. The tops and bottoms are not the same curve or size. They have a much looser interpretation of the letter S.

Once again you start at the bottom, stitch up, to create the lazy S, then loosely echo it. Notice that, for grass, they are all different size “blades” and they lean in slightly different directions.

Also note that I left the top of the row of grass, not straight across, but undulating.

This allows for coming back and adding more rows of grass to fill in the area you want to quilt and creates a nice even distribution of texture.

Multi-purpose

This is a versatile design. If you were quilting something that featured this fabric:

You can quilt the exact same design. Just change the name to “Flames”

If you quilt the exact same design but do it sideways…

It can be “Wind” or “Water“.

Pro Tip:

Add in a swirl here or there, for either wind or water, to increase the movement.

This design also works to simulate wood grain.

Maybe there’s a tree appliqued on your quilt?  Bookshelf quilts are quite popular. This design would be great to quilt the wooden shelves!

What other uses can you think of for this design? Please share in the comments.

Relax and have fun quilting the lazy S!

by Mary Beth Krapil