Good Morning, Quilters!
Just days to go before St. Valentine’s Day…chocolates, roses, love letters, hearts….
This tutorial is called “The Doodle Heart” because I have been doodling this motif forever..long before I tried quilting!
Doodles make great quilt motifs because they are already hard-wired into our brain…
THE DOODLE HEART TUTORIAL
The Rails
When first learning this motif, you may want to draw a few lines to get the proportions right.
The Doodle Heart is a square motif. Start with any size square that fits YOUR quilt and then divide it into quadrants.
The full squares in this tutorial are 2 inches by 2 inches and then subdivided into 1 inch quadrants.
Begin stitching on the lower middle line. Stitch out toward (but not quite touching the outer right edge. (The widest part of the heart should be near the midline.) Spiral in-keeping the curve inside the upper right quadrant.
Continue to spiral inward. If your square is larger than 2″, you may have more spirals…
Stop at the center and spiral out again. Taper to the bottom starting point.
Create the left side of the heart the same way. Spiral in and stop.
Spiral out and taper down to the bottom point. (If you want to add an inner embellishment…stitch it now.)
From the bottom point, echo stitch the outer edge of the entire heart.
The heart should look like this:
NOTE-Add more than one row of echo stitching around the heart to increase the size.
You may add inner embellishments–a small heart, your initials…
Tie off to begin the next heart as I did below or add a connecting loop-de-loop to begin the next heart.
This motif can be combined in many ways and looks great as a border as well as a full block motif. Vary The Doodle Heart by changing the proportions–elongate the lower quadrants, or widen the square.
Have fun with this–or Stitch YOUR OWN DOODLE! We’d love to see it!
Later this week: My 2015 Valentine Mini Quilt with lots of Doodle Hearts…
Tomorrow: The MYSTERY…The Picture is Coming Together…
Thursday— “Tension Troubleshooting” article…I hope to have this ready by Thursday???
Happy Stitching,
Lori
PS…All tutorials, images and information are the property of Lori Kennedy at The Inbox Jaunt and are intended for personal use only. Feel free to re-blog, pin, share with attribution to The Inbox Jaunt. For all other purposes, please contact me at lckennedy@hotmail.com. Thanks!
