Machine Quilting
A rainy Saturday in March – the perfect kind of day to stay indoors and improve my machine quilting skills. Don’t you think?! So that’s exactly what I did. ~smile~ In an earlier article, I discussed the three sewing machines we have. I use two of them regularly. I purchased a walking foot that I thought would be able to fit on Lily as well as the Brother model, but I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. After half an hour of both of us trying to get that tiny, tiny, tiny screw to attach the walking foot to Lily to no avail, we gave up and tried the Brother machine. It took 5 seconds for success . . . there’s half an hour of time we can’t get back . . . HAHA
Here’s the brand I researched that would fit our machine, and here it is attached in just seconds (!!). We have no affiliation with this brand – it is just the brand that would work for us. The walking foot does come with a guide that can move to either side to help you stitch a straight line or an equidistance across the quilt. I have to say the guide works really well.
I set the stitch size to rather large (4.5) to mimic hand stitching more closely. This was after ironing the backing, batting and quilt top; sandwiching the three layers; and pinning and basting all around the quilt top through the three layers. Here is a shot showing the beginning stitches started in the extra batting outside the quilt top as well as our basting stitches:
I let the pattern itself dictate how this quilt should be quilted. It was a nine patch alternating with a 5″ square, so I stitched in-the-ditch in straight lines around the nine patch and through the plain squares. You will see the finished result shortly, as this quilt is going up in our Etsy shop. This is my second machine quilted finished quilt, and I am pretty happy with the results. I am sure I will become more comfortable with it the more I practice, and may even have some tips and tricks to share with you later. Are you already using your machine for quilting or are you sticking with hand quilting?
