Over the course of the last year, I have found so much joy in creating through art and thread. Joy that helped to heal heartache, which was so deeply needed. I shared a little bit about this in my post: The Heart of Life. This Mackinac Boat collage came from spending time reflecting on my father, our relationship, and his lifelong passion for boats. I created the collage and made it in quilt and then spent time adding some life to it through the free motion quilting technique: Doodling.

For me, doodling while free motion quilting helps in a few ways:

• It helps me relax my shoulders and loosen up, which is one of the things I struggle with while trying to move my quilt sandwich without the help of my machine’s feed dog or a consistent forward motion.
• It helps me to play across the fabric and add details that are important to me.
• It helps me to focus on fabric choice, thread color, and design when bringing things together at the end, allowing me to create a cohesive design.
• It adds texture to my quilts in small ways, which I really appreciate. Texture is one of my favorite quilting elements and creates very sweet when working on a small scale quilt project.

You can find a helpful start here in my free motion quilting Doodle Fun guide.

You can see my doodle methods for The Mackinac Boat Collage:

• Waves for the water of the Great Lakes using different colored threads- I quilting them densely trying to add a lot of small movement to the water. At night, with the shadow of the moon reflecting on the water, but in small movements.
• Yellow highlights doodling around one of my favorite fabrics: “Dwell” by Alison Glass with the center moon shining in focus.

I wanted to simplify the background to be one scene and doodling around some of the design elements was the perfect way to do this. It’s clear to me from my father’s writings that the unseen things were always what inspired him the most. The veil of what we cannot quite behold, but that we know will await us when we pass.

You can find some more inspiration handy in more of my tutorials.

Until next time, keep doodling <3 Kate