Longarm Quilt #80 Purple Aurora – how to "fancy quilt" with no stops

I did some fancy quilting on this quilt for my friend.

Because there were big areas of solid fabrics, I wanted to do something fancy; and since it was so big, I wanted a design where I could work my way across the quilt without any stops and starts. When you have lots of stops and starts in your designs, it takes longer to quilt and you have to be careful about taking tiny stitches at the beginning and end of each design so the threads don't come loose. (Or you have to bury your thread tails - shudder)

Time to break out the quilting books for ideas and my big piece of acrylic and the dry erase markers. I came up with several designs, then laid the acrylic on top of the quilt to see if I could travel from one design to the next easily.

Close up so you can see how I traveled across the quilt.

I knew I could use the patchwork section as a guideline for quilting, so I did a loopy circle in each patch and then quilted big leaf shapes with veins for traveling in the black sashing.

I had recently seen the Dwirling design on the Pajama Quilter's DVD and thought that would add some cool texture to the big areas. It reminds me of a topo map.

Isn't this fabric gorgeous!

One corner of the quilt

I used Superior Omni thread in Jewel and So Fine in Amethyst in the bobbin and black 80/20 batting. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.