Apparently I'm not alone in feeling uncertain about how to quilt a One Block Wonder. I'm in the midst of sewing my second one and just love the serendipity and forgiving nature of this style of quilting. The arrangement of the hexagons makes quilting it a puzzler. My first OBW went un-quilted. Inexperienced as i am, I chose to make it with a lovely Ralph Lauren Lakota Paisley, in a suede like fabric, and although it turned out beautiful, the thought of trying to quilt through all that thickness is too daunting. Because it is intended as a wall hanging, I used a fusible batting and no quilting.
Desperation led me to use my computer's Paint program to brainstorm ideas for this next quilt, but then I got carried away. I’ve created some templates and I thought to share them for the personal use of anyone who likes them. I'm a novice and have little knowledge of traditional patterns and designs, but liked people's suggestions of doing e2e and allover quilting. Some of my ideas are most likely nothing new to quilting, but they are laid out on the hexagon grid, so that might be helpful. I tried to make some doable as continuous line quilting. Also, quilts are better when the quilting itself ties into the overall design.
The best template of all is the blank one, which hopefully people can print out and use to doodle their own designs. I'm hoping other people might also post some of their own ideas, because I have gotten requests from family for at least 3 more One Block Wonder quilts.
Template 1: A Blank Template for a One Block Wonder Quilt - A basic hexagon grid. The center of each hexagon is marked with a pink dot, which is handy to know where it is when planning out your quilting pattern so you can avoid having to sew through it as often as possible.
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Template 2: Waves Quilting Pattern - This continuous line pattern looks a little Oriental to me. It would beautiful to include one or two outlines of an element from your fabric, such as koi fish or a lotus, in and amongst the waves.
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Template 3: Vines & Leaves Quilting Pattern
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Template 4: Trillium Quilting Pattern - Really just simple circles. The petals would look more like Trillium if they were wider.
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Template 5: Ticker Tape Parade Quilting Pattern - The addition of the stars makes it look rather patriotic, but you will see that IÂ’ve reused to ribbon twirl for other themes.
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Template 6: Prairie Style Spheres Quilting Pattern - this looks very complicated, but it is really just overlapping large circles.
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Template 7: Forget-me-not Quilting Pattern - I drew this from a real flower. Each separate motif can be quilted in a continuous line. With small adjustments, the flowers would also look like apple blossoms and wild roses.
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Template 8: Escher Birds Quilting Pattern - Inspired by M.C. Escher’s painting “Day and Night”. Which in turn came from having the Cole Porter song “Night and Day” stuck in my head.
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Template 9: Daisy Chain Quilting Pattern - Very simple to do as a continuous line and it avoids those heavy layers in the centers of the hexagons.
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Template 10: Curling Ribbons Quilting Pattern
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Template 11: Cathedral Window Style Quilting Pattern - it reminded me a of a Cathedral Window quilt.
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Template 12: Butterflies Quilting Pattern - IÂ’d really like suggestions on how to simplify this and make it less busy.
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