Kathryn's Gravity Quilt
Hi there! Have you had the chance to quilt a Gravity quilt? Or do you have a Gravity Quilt that needs to be quilted? I have quilted several but kept poor pictorial records so I decided to blog about this one to refer back to it if I need to quilt another one. There are several ways to quilt these big beauties. I want to feature custom quilting for this blog post. I did a combination of hand-guided free motion, ruler work, and one of the grey diamonds has echo quilting that I digitized with my CS7 software.
The Gravity Quilt Pattern was designed and written by Jaybird Quilts. It features lots of diamond shapes that are fun to fill up with pretty quilting. This quilt is often run as a block of the month and includes lots of really lovely solid fabric. The exciting thing about solid fabric quilts is that they really show off the quilting. So think wisely about your design placement and thread color choice.
Before I loaded this quilt I thought I would use just two shades of grey thread to quilt the entire quilt, but after loading it up I quickly changed my mind. I have a rainbow of threads to choose from, so I chose colors that would blend in the blocks.
Kathryn wanted the quilting to be more geometric, with some swirls, pebbles and limited feathers.
I stitched around the inside of each shape to create a frame effect then filled the area with quilting designs that flowed through each block, radiating out from the center of the quilt.
It was definitely hardest for me to come up with designs for the grey diamonds. Kathryn sent me pictures of Natalia Bonner’s Gravity quilt and said she loved how those diamonds were quilted. I wanted to give it that flavor without copying Natalia’s awesome work. I already knew what I wanted to quilt in the colored diamond sections, so that wasn’t too challenging.
I am getting ready to teach a Welsh Quilting workshop in Chicago, so I kinda had that style on my mind and the little sprouts popped up a couple places in Kathryn’s quilt. I also tried to tie in the swirls from the grey diamonds as well as pebbles and line work.
I used a bunch of different thread colors for this quilt. I will list them at the bottom if you want to know specifically which ones I used. All the thread was Glide 40 wt.
There are 18 colored diamond blocks, but really only 9 because each is repeated. I would like to say that I knew about this when I started, but I only noticed when I was at the half way point. I tried to quilt each of the couples similar, if not the same so they would communicate that way as well.
There are times when these big custom quilts are a battle to quilt, but this one went smoothly and I am thrilled with how it turned out. I used the same color in the bobbin throughout the quilt. Sometimes I like to change out the color on the back, but right now my tension is spot on so I went all medium grey on the back. I like the effect of it looking like a whole cloth on one side and colors on the other.
Here are the details…
Maker: Kathryn
Quilter: Tia Curtis
Machine: Gammill Longarm
Batting: Quilters Dream Wool
Rulers: The Quilted Pineapple Straight
Thread: Glide 40 wt in Flint, Sterling, Medium Grey, Sand, Celery, Sea Green, Mermaid, Peacock, Amethyst, Fuchsia, Imperial Red, Coral, Auburn, Tarheel, and Pacific. I am sure there were more, but I put them away like a responsible quilter. The Threads above were left out on the back of the table so I know I used them.
Ok, have a great day, and Thanks for reading this blog! Leave a comment if you want to so I can know you were here. Last thing! I have LOTS of videos of me quilting this quilt on my Instagram. Please check them out.