Free Motion Script Session 1: Introduction

[Upbeat Music] Once you start making quilts that are entirely your own, one of the most fabulous things that you can add to your repertoire, is writing on those quilts. I started writing on my quilts a long time ago. I needed to make a baby quilt for somebody and I decided to put in the inner border, my hopes and dreams for that baby. And it went over so well that I started writing in almost every quilt that I'd give away. If it's a graduation gift I write to them, if it's a gift for somebody that I've never given a quilt to before, I write to them, usually in an inner border, but sometimes you know elsewhere on the quilt too.

Learning to write in the quilting is one of the easiest things that we can do because we already have that ability. We already know how to write. A lot of us don't use cursive very often anymore, but a little bit of practice will remind us how we did it before and so it's easy to come back to. So it's a great way to increase our free motion skills too. I'm always looking for ways to write on my quilts and sometimes they're little tiny ways and sometimes the whole quilt is built around the writing.

This is a little tiny piece that I made when I was doing a piece of art everyday and somebody told me that I used this word a lot. And I thought, well that's a compliment. I like the word 'yes'. So, I just wrote the word 'yes' on this piece and people look at the piece and go, "Mm-hmm, yeah, yes." So it's just got one little word on it and that one little word can pack a wallop. Where as this one, the words are much more right there in front of your face.

Find your bliss. And this is a good example of how I tend to write on my quilts. I often build that line up and as you look at this you can see that I've stitched over and over again on top of that line so that it's thicker and it's got some variances in the thickness along the way. It adds a lot of interest. It's also high contrast and sometimes I'll stitch in high contrast and sometimes I'll stitch in low contrast.

Sometimes I want the stitching to kind of be hidden, and sometimes I want it to be the thing. On this one, the stitching is very, very demure if you will. You can barely even see it. Here we have the word 'dream', and here we have the word 'play', and here we have 'create'. And these are kind of my mantra, and I wanted them just to be a little after thought in the corner of each of these areas.

Just something that as you came in and looked at the piece you went, "Oh, oh she's written something there." And then you read it. I did the same thing with this guy here. I wanted to put some prose on this piece, and I do that often on my quilts. And I often do it in the border and on this one it's here in the border. And we've got this wonderful little quilt with three birds, and it says, "Three little birds whispered sweet somethings in her ear, then she knew that all was right with her world, her course was steady, and she was content." Just a nice little prose.

And it's surrounded by wonderful little circles that help show it off, but at the same time it's a little hidden treat that not everybody notices. I like it when this is hanging and the person who's looking at it goes, "Oh! Oh there's writing in there." And then she reads it and gets a little kick out of it. So, this is very simple writing, I haven't built it up really heavily, it's just one pass through. And then sometimes I make the writing the thing.

So this piece, I knew I wanted to write prose on it, I knew that I wanted it to be augmented by some sort of decorative stitch so, I stitched out the flowers and then this was stitched out as a separate quilt. And it says, "It was a simple thing, she was in love with a good man and her beautiful children, with the world that she had created, beauty dripped from her fingertips, joy escaped from her lips. She knew she was complete. She was in love, and for a few moments of every day, she was happy." And this was from a series that I've been doing that's called 'She was happy'. And it's a nice way to make a piece of art, but it's also a nice way to write a sentiment to somebody.

And it's easy to do because we already have that skill set. We already have that ability to write, kind of embedded in our memory, our muscle memory. So, I'm going to show you how I go about doing this and how easy it can be, and hopefully you'll really like writing on your quilts too.