Super easy quilted diamonds

Since I teach some beginner longarm classes at The Longarm Network I use the veterans quilts to practice and develop new quilting patterns that will be easy for beginner longarmers. The one I have today is an even simpler version of the Wavy Crosshatch, my favorite go-to quilting motif.

It's so simple that you can figure it out from this photo. 
This quilt is made from 4-patches and that's usually a direct call for the Wavy Crosshatch but I wanted something even simpler. This is just a free-motion option to ruler work straight lines. Quilting a curved diagonal line is much easier than quilting a straight diagonal line. In this case I curved the lines down on left to right passes and curved the lines up on right to left passes.

For a beginner quilter you are building 2 skills here:
1 - Quilting smooth curves. The nice thing about this pattern is that a couple of wonky curves aren't going to stand out but by the time you get to the end of the quilt your curves will be pretty smooth.
2 - More importantly, you will be practicing stopping at specific points. Ideally you want your points on each row to touch so that anyone looking at the quilt can't be sure how you quilted it.You only learn to do that with practice and this is a perfect practice pattern.

When you are done you are better at both of those skills AND you have a quilt quilted!

Oh, but what if you have rectangles instead of squares?
No problem! In this case I used a purple air erasable pen to draw a line through the middle of the row. That gave me my stopping points. But I could have also simply made very long skinny diamonds and that would have looked good too.
Once you have this mastered you can come back and add all kinds of elements to dress it up:

• a second pass with an echoed curve (inside or out)
• a curl at each point curling into the curve of the line
• add a loop to the curved line
• a second pass with a curved line in the opposite direction, creating the traditional seedpod pattern

It really is the simplest of simple patterns but it has a lovely overall effect.

Betty B. from my quilt club made this pretty quilt. I think it's manly but still calming and soothing.

This is the first quilt that I got to add our new quilt labels to! One of our members has been printing labels for the back of the quilts. Of course no one really likes sewing on quilt labels and I found these at Ikaprint on France. They are small but you can't beat 200 labels for less than $30 (including shipping). It's a lot less expensive than what Becky was paying for printer-ready fabric. The labels arrived quickly and now Terry and I can sew on the labels as we quilt the quilts. it's one less step for the binders to do!

If anyone looks on the back they will see this message.

​I quilted this quilt on the 4th of July. It seemed only appropriate to quilt a quilt on our birthday.