Fish Quilt Step 1 – Quilting the Background Blocks

Want to learn how to make a quilt with an easy online workshop – totally free?

Sign up for Let’s Make a Quilt here. You’ll learn how to get started, the tools and supplies you’ll need, and how to make a quilt from start to finish using Quilt As You Go and applique with fusible adhesive.

It’s the easiest, most fun way to make an applique quilt. You can do it!

The Fish quilt pattern is finished (you can get it here) and I’m sharing some of the behind-the-scenes design decisions I made for my sample quilt.

Today – quilting the background blocks!

I used fabrics from my Blue Batiks bundle and cut all my blocks and batting pieces 11 inches square. They’ll be trimmed down to 10 1/2″ square so that gives me a bit of wiggle room. You can cut yours a little bigger if you like more room for error. 🙂

I usually do different quilting in each block, but for this quilt I decided to use a double wavy line for every block. It gives a nice watery/wavy look that’s perfect for the fish.

You can see how I quilt those wavy lines (no marking!) in this video.

One other change for this quilt is in my choice of quilting thread. I usually match the thread pretty closely to the background fabric, but this time I wanted those waves to stand out a bit more. I chose thread with a little bit of contrast – either darker or lighter blue, and sometimes veering into a blue-green.

Here’s one with slightly lighter thread.