Free Motion Script Session 2: Choose Your Prose, Saying or Quote Then Learn the Basics of Free Motion Stitch

So before I would write in a quilt for the first time, I would probably do some practicing. And it's important when you practice that you practice the right things, that you're not just writing away. And there are some things that you can do that can really add beauty to the writing that you're doing. But also you wanna make sure that you are being consistent with the size of your letter so that the scale is similar. That you pay attention to letters that rise above the halfway mark of the area that you're stitching in and letters that hang down below the area that you're stitching on or the line that you're stitching on.

So we have to kind of play with those ideas first when we're practicing. And then also we need to make sure that we space the words out properly so that they fill the space that we're trying to put them in, and they don't end up overcrowded at the end because we're trying to crowd all the words in or leaving long spaces with no writing in them at all when we are planning on that writing continuing on and on. So that's especially important if you're quilting in a border. So I always practice first. And sometimes if I'm writing on a quilt, in fact I did a quilt once where the writing was about three-feet long and about 2.5-feet tall.

The quilt was really big. And so I needed to make sure that I was doing that in such a way that I was gonna actually fill the space that I needed to fill. So I always figure out a way how to scale what I'm writing down to a reasonable sized piece of paper, usually by dividing. So if the area that I'm gonna put it in is like 18-inches long by 12-inches tall, then if I divide both of those by say four, then four goes into 18 4.5 times and it goes into 12 three times, I could work on a piece of paper that's 4.5 by three and get basically the same results. I can decide how many lines I'm going to have, and then I can spread those words apart and I can get really good spacing.

So practicing first is important. I've decided on a simple quote by Rumi. "Wherever you stand be the soul of that place." And I like to put these sorts of things in my work. I like to make things meaningful. So you can find a favorite quote.

You could have a story that you wanna tell. You can simply wanna put somebody's name and birth date or that sort of thing in a piece of work. So here I have a piece that's a rectangle, and I'm going to be stitching on a rectangle. And so you can see here that this rectangle is slightly smaller than this one, but it's about the same scale. So I can play with that pretty well.

And I can choose different ways of placing those words. Right now I've got three words, three words, four words. This one's pretty small and so is this one. And then I've got room for the writer, Rumi. It's important if you're using a quote to include the person who's quote it is.

Not that anybody's gonna get in trouble or anything, but it's just nice to pay homage where it's due. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn this, and I'm gonna utilize two areas and try other ways of writing this, and choose one that I like the most. One of the things that I often like to do is take that first letter and make it larger, kind of play with it in size. So when I do this, then this W you can see is hanging down below that line that I'm doing my writing on. So that I can play with, so wherever you...

And that Y is hanging down below also, so now these are both below the line that I'm writing on. If I wanted to really make that W big, I could. And then I'm gonna start my next line a little further over. Wherever you stand, be. So now I'm only gonna have two words on that line.

Then the Rumi will go over here. So that's another option. So I'm just gonna play with options here to see kind of what I liked the most. I happen to really like capital Ws, so I'm probably gonna go with a big fancy capital W. So I'm gonna try this again with a different layout.

It looks the same right now, but it's going to be different. So I've compacted. Actually, what I'm really gonna do is go for a fancy R here too. So I've repeated that big swirl. So that gives me the opportunity to kind of play with flourishes a little bit more.

So those are options here. My first option was almost equal. Here I've got the shorter. And as I'm looking at this, I think this is what I'm gonna go with. I just really liked the way it looks.

And I'm gonna go ahead and use Rumi quite a bit smaller. So now I'm gonna move to a full-size piece. If I were doing a very large piece, I would never move to the full size. But I want you to sort of see what it looks like to work from a full-size drawing of my quilt. So that's about the size of my piece minus about an inch in this height.

So I'm gonna go ahead and draw a line here. And I don't get to stitch down in there or draw down in there. Okay, so that's a dead zone. And in the drawing that I liked the most, I have four lines. Now I have approximately 10 inches here, and I need four lines.

And so I can guesstimate how far apart they're going to be. And basically they're gonna be, oh, about an inch and a half to inch and 3/4, or two inches, or two and a quarter. Depends on how high I want my capitals to be and how low I want my lower portions of my letters to be. If I'm doing it exactly 10 divided by four, it's gonna give me 2.5 inches each. So we'll go ahead and mark our 2.5 inches.

And then after that, we'll decide how we're going to be working with our upper and lower letters. And again, I'm not necessarily... Going to make sure that this is absolutely perfect, 'cause I'm just practicing on this, but somewhat. I can go in and subdivide. Just like when we were in kindergarten and they had that dotted line in the middle between our rows that helped us put our high letters high and our low letters low.

So that's about an inch and a quarter would be the middle. I'm just gonna do a light dotted line. So this is gonna help me with the scale of my letters also. That means how big they are in relation to the space. And that's gonna help me determine how close they need to be together so that I can fit them all on the lines that they need to be on.

Okay, now I'm gonna start with my W, and I see here that my W is going almost all the way down to the bottom of my second line. And so that's pretty big. But I also need to make sure that I have enough space for everything else too. So my W is gonna be pretty narrow. Like so.

That Y is gonna come almost down to that middle of the line underneath it, wherever you stand. Be over here. And then Rumi, okay. This is gonna be problematic here because my P is gonna be going down in a space that I don't have. And so I'm gonna have to make sure that I remember to move that up just a bit.

I'm gonna want to elongate that and probably elongate that. And this is about the size things are going to be. Now if I have any letters that have... I have to cross the T or dot the I, I have to decide am I gonna do that during the stitch out or I'm gonna do it after the stitch out? Is it gonna be part of a flourish?

How am I gonna handle that? Basically when I draw a T, I do it during the stitch out. So I'm stitching along, and I stitch up and I come down halfway. Stitch across, double over, all the way over back to the center and down so that I cross my T when I stitch it. If I have an I, I come up and I formed the I.

I put a tiny little circle, and I come back down and finish. I basically have an attached dot to my I. So we have all these different letters that we wanna play with. You can go online and Google lettering, and get a thousand different fonts. Thousands and thousands of different fonts.

You can Google calligraphy, you can Google cursive, and you can have all these wonderful different fonts that you can practice. What you're looking for though is letters that are attached to each other. We're gonna be having to stop in between words, and knot off, and travel, and start a new word, and knot off again. We don't wanna have to do that between every single letter. It's one thing to do it between words.

It's a whole nother thing to do between letters. So we want our lettering to be continuous, and it takes some practice. If you haven't done cursive in a long time, just practice. Practice the thing that you wanna write. You don't need to practice the whole alphabet, practice the thing you wanna write.

So once we know our positioning, we're good to then mark our piece and then we can start stitching. Before I stitch this one however, I am going to show you first how I go about really making a very decorative letter. And were I to draw it, we would come in here and I'm gonna do the W because that's our big letter that we have there. And what I have so far is basically this which is fancier than the rest of the lettering, but it's all that fancy. And so I can really add a lot of interest to this.

And one of the things that I do first is I do what I call thickening up, and I draw an outline. So if I want to thicken areas of it up, of the letter up, I'll draw an outline. And then after that, I'll go through, see other areas I wanna thicken. Basically make decisions along the way about what I want to have thick and what I'm gonna have remained thin. If I want something really thick, how I can change that.

And then whether or not I want to add flourishes to anything. And I can do that when any time I want to. So I kind of play with different ideas. How flourishy I want things to be. How I can thicken lines.

Now a thickened line once it's stitched is going to be filled in with the thread. So this becomes a very thick line that is nothing but thread, and it really builds up the surface. So I'm careful about what I choose to do and how much I choose to do because I don't wanna be working on one letter for 14 hours. But I do want to add interest to that. So we'll do that first.

So now we're ready to mark our piece, and choose our threads, and get started with the sewing.