My love affair was sparked when I watched Cindy Needham's class called Design it, Quilt it: Free Form Techniques. I'm not sure why I waited so long to take this class. I knew she would be talking about stencils and I have never used them, so I was not sure how relevant the class would be for me. All I can say is I wish I had downloaded it before now. One of the topics she covered was shadow and sunshine with in the quilting. This was something I had never considered before...creating shadowing. It's easy to look at a painting or drawing and see these techniques, but I had never really thought about it in quilting.
In the beginning, if I needed a background filler I would have just tried stippling, because it was what I knew how to do. As I felt more comfortable moving the fabric under the needle I added other fillers to my list and learned that some fillers would make things stand out better.
I used loops as a filler in this boarder to create diamond shapes, though I would not say that it creates much shadow.
I used back and forth lines in the in the white blocks of the 16 patches to make the unquilted pink squares stand out more, getting slightly more dense and more shadow.
I used Kathleen from Kathleen Quilts tutorial on doing these flying geese to create quilted blocks in the sashing of this quilt. My lines are closer together and creates even more shadow, making my little birds stand out as they fly.
Now to meet my new best friend...scribbling.
Honestly, it's not that pretty to look at on paper and it breaks all the rules, which makes it pretty easy to do. WARNING: YOUR LINES WILL CROSS. I played around on some scrap sandwiches before I actually tried it on something I was working on.
This is the center of the mini quilt I'm working on and I still have quite a bit more to do, but I love the effect of all the dense quilting. I'm not sure if the pictures do it justice, but it almost looks like a delicate lace in between the feather plums.