laurac

I piece by machine and quilt by hand. I don't have trouble finding patterns I like but I always struggle with finding good quilting designs. Where do you get your inspirations for hand quilting?

popover

I visit all the stencil websites and buy some, get ideas from others. LOTS of stencils out there for hand quilting.

tessagin

I pull up different quilts of say Hunter's Star or even a log cabin to see different ideas of how they've been quilted. Also depends on who it's for. Some quilts for men, you may want to go with a "manly" not so floral versus more floral for women. Baby quilt with cutesy animals or themed. Not sure what i'm going to do with my son's. It has a deer panel and will have Hunter's star and rail fence or 4 patch. I took a photo of the panel so I could print it. Will go from there. I have a lot of stencils but may incorporate linear work into it. Will see.

Genden

I have a lot of stencils. I also have hand quilter friends, get ideas from them and trade stencils. I wish I could find more hand quilting in quilt shows so I could get more ideas.

MadQuilter

I have taken some classes about deciding on quilt patterns. That helped. Craftsy has some.

NJ Quilter

That's my biggest challenge as well. I've collected a reasonable number of stencils over the years and can usually manage to find something that works. Sometimes one of the quilts 'screams' for a certain design that I, fortunately, already have. Lots of times, though, when I'm on a deadline, I just do echo quilting within the blocks and call it done. That is one of the things that I scour quilt shops for when traveling, however. Most quilters buy fabric - I buy stencils. I can imagine their use much more easily than I can a fabric I have no specific quilt in mind.

popover

One of my favorite places to play

https://www.quiltingcreations.com/st...CategoryID=194

feline fanatic

IMHO the absolute best resource for wrapping your head around handquilting design (designing how you want to quilt your quilt) is "The Essential Quilter" by Barbara Cheney. It is well worth the investment and you can pick it up used fairly cheap on the internet. Here is just one link:
http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-ess...pkw=&pmt=&plc=

I don't hand quilt any more because now I have a longarm but by machine or by hand we still face the same delimma. Now I approach piecing patterns differently. I incorporate my thoughts on quilting it before deciding on a pattern. I have yet to be faced with a pattern that I draw a complete blank on when quilting, whether it be custom or an all over design. However, with hand quilting I always took my seam allowance into consideration. My "go to" for most hand quilting was to at least echo the patchwork, usually coming in 1/4" to avoid quilting through all the bulk of the seam allowances. When it came to "fancy" motifs I tried to place those in the negative space portion of the quilt. Areas where there are no seams and lots of blank space to show off the quilting.

I find inspiration for quilting all around me. Pinterest is a great resource. I entered "hand Quilting Patterns" as my search and got lots of pictures of ideas. Other places to look for inspiration: Architectural elements, go to museum and take in the frames of old paintings, decorative tiles, wrought iron, the design on a box of tissues. The possibilities are endless.

pocoellie

Try www.forestquilting.com, they have a ton of free quilting patterns, all shapes and sizes.

Jingle

I never use quilting patterns. Even when I hand quilted years ago. I didn't even think about it.

Now I mainly do FMQ by machine. I'm not interested in using quilting patterns.