Zen Doodle Quilting

     I have watched a number of Graffiti quilting youtube videos by Karlee Porter ... love her work, but discovered that I am better at filling in contained spaces rather than starting from a small point and randomly creating swirls and circles and lines and arrows to fill in a larger space.  So after a couple attempts, I resorted to a Zentangle - Zendoodle type of machine quilting. My goal was to find patterns that could be continuous line drawing so that it wasn't necessary to stop and start frequently with the sewing machine.

     This is probably the easiest one to do which looks the most complicated. I think it is called Rick's Paradox ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wsVrw4DhpM ... there are lots of youtube videos out there, but this one is fairly simple to follow. On my pattern above, I started with 4 squares on the left and 2 larger triangles to the right.

     And of course, learning a new pattern is only worthwhile if you have somewhere to use it!!

     This was fun. The pattern on the left is kind of like onion skins ... ran out of bobbin thread so I didn't finish up the block and decided to try something new. The spider web worked great and then I worked on some triangles.  I've been using up bits and pieces of almost empty spools and bobbins.

     Used the onion skin pattern to fill in a teapot until the bobbin ran out again! Not sure what to do with the handle but since this is just for fun and practice, I may not do anything with it.

     I tried to use different patterns in the leaves, but they are a bit small so I just had some fun with lines and circles.

     I have a couple friends in my fibre arts group who like giraffes so I thought I would try a giraffe sample to show them.  This could make a pretty neat TALL quilt if one decided to do the whole body!!  A suggestion yesterday at FAB (fibre arts bee) was to make a variety of animals and use them as alternate blocks in a kid's quilt. Hmmmmm.....

     So where to go from here? I need to try out different colouring methods. Markers, pencil crayons, crayons, paints .....
     I created a new sample to use as a practice piece for colouring.

     This is roughly 19 inches square .. a borrowed picture from a colouring book I had which I enlarged and traced onto white cloth, added a fusible interfacing as well as batting and a backing. 
Well ... I decided I liked this and didn't want to mess it up experimenting with different colours on it, so, time to make another smaller sample.