Did you have a super favorite t-shirt that needs a super special machine quilting design? James's octopus t-shirt was exactly that sort of garment. He wore this shirt for only three weeks when he was an itsy bitsy newborn baby, and Josh and I both got a kick seeing him in it for only that short space of time.
To machine quilt this block, I didn't want to overwhelm the octopus design, but emphasize it with simple lines securing the layers of the quilt together. I decided to quilt with Rays - simple straight lines radiating out from the center of the block.
This design is very easy, but it does involve breaking thread a bit. Sometimes you have to pull up a new line of stitching and start quilting in the center in order for the excess fabric and batting in the block to shift outwards. So other than dealing with a few thread breaks, this is one of the easiest machine quilting designs we've learned so far!
Let's learn how to machine quilt this design in the video next:
I love the bulls-eye effect that this machine quilting design added to this quilt block. The octopus really stands out nicely against the lines and is clearly the star of the show!
An easy variation of rays will be Wiggly Rays! Machine quilt wiggly lines instead and it will definitely change up the look of the design. We've mostly focused on machine quilting straight lines with our walking foot because it's so easy to pick a direction and stitch straight down your quilt, but you can achieve curves with your walking foot as well by pivoting the quilt to left and right smoothly on the quilt surface.
To learn more about walking foot quilting, I challenged myself to quilt all the blocks of my t-shirt quilts with a combination of walking foot and free motion quilting. I shared the following tutorials so you can learn how to quilt these easy designs with your walking foot too!
