In addition to this blog, I also have a journal at another site, and someone there asked me how to free motion quilt. Although I am certainly no expert, I offered her what I’ve learned so far, and other people seemed to find it helpful, so I thought I would offer the same “tutorial” here.
1. If your machine doesn’t have one already, buy a darning foot or embroidery foot – they look like some variation of this
and are not expensive.
2. Lower the feed dogs on your machine. If you don’t know what they are (I didn’t when I first started machine quilting!) here’s a picture of the
throat plate. The “feed dogs” are the little teeth under the presser foot (the thing that holds your fabric down). Your machine may have an automatic button to lower and raise your feed dogs, other machines are manual. On one of my machines, it’s a toggle switch next to the bobbin case, and on my other machine, it’s a toggle switch at the back and underneath the machine. Your instruction manual will tell you where and how.
3. Before you actually start quilting your quilt, I would practice (and practice and practice (!) ) on small pieces of batted fabric – potholder sized should do it. Just lower your presser foot and go to town. You’ll know that you’ve got it figured out when your stitches look the way you want to them to. Just keep moving your hands in the shapes and swirls you want. Try drawing a pattern on the fabric and following it, or following a pattern already in the fabric until you feel comfortable.
comfortable.
4. I’ve found that machine quilting is counter-intuitive for me. You have to run your machine quite fast (much faster than you’ll probably feel comfortable doing); and move your hands slowly. If you’re moving your hands too fast, you’ll end up with stitches like this:
Big and loose looking. If you’re a hand quilter and this is your first time machine quilting, you’ll be horrified! *w* On the back, your stitches may look like this:
*ack!* I took a beginner machine quilting class and brought that as an example of what kept happening to me (I was insanely frustrated because no amount of futzing with tension, stitch length or even bobbin tension helped. She told me that it was because I was moving my hands too fast, and lo and behold, she was right.)
This is an early example of my moving my hands too fast (on the right), next to an example of me moving my hands slowly (on the left):
You can really see the difference!
6. When you’re comfortable and can consistently get the stitch length and tension you want, you’re ready to move on to your quilt! After you’ve batted and pinned your quilt (if you’ve used straight pins before, you may wish to switch to safety pins unless you’re comfortable a: being stabbed to death by your quilt and b: bleeding all over your quilt – yes, I speak from experience lol) you’ll want to roll up the sides of your quilt very tightly and then safety pin those suckers down as tightly as you can like so:
(cat not absolutely necessary, but I find, it helps). *s*
You always want to quilt from the centre out, so that you can smooth any unevenness of fabric out as you go.
7. So, take a deep breath, lower your presser foot and begin quilting. Keep in mind, that your quilt will be much heavier than your practice pieces, so your initial stitches won’t be as beautiful as the ones you’ve achieved in your practice pieces. Quite quickly though, you should catch on to the difference the weight makes, but even if you don’t, don’t worry – that’s what a seam ripper is for!
And that’s it! It’s really not hard at all.
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