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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 a variety of blue batik fabrics 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.

And here’s one with slightly darker thread. And here’s one with some blueish green thread.

It’s subtle – but I like how it adds to the dapply, watery effect.

Read all about choosing colors for your fish here.

Read about how I worked with the print of the fabric here.

Read about how I did my final quilting (bubbles!) here.

Happy quilting!