#55 – Success

#55 - Success
Yesterday, I had such bad time trying to free motion quilt but I wasn’t ready to give up. I set it aside overnight & went at it today with a fresh attitude. It helped to read that a lot of other people doing the quilt-a-long were having the same problems & it wasn’t just me. What you are looking at here is a quilt that is close to half quilted!

What did I do differently than yesterday? Nothing much really. First I changed to a fresh 90/14 needle. Then I rethreaded the top thread & the bobbin. I did change my stitch length to 0.2 (the lowest my machine would let me go) though I’m not sure it makes a difference. I made a new small quilt sandwich to practice on. The first pass has some tension issues but after putting my tension all the way to 6 that was taken care of. I quilted the whole practice piece & felt pretty comfortable that everything was working.
Practice Piece #2
Then I switched to my real quilt & yea, it worked. Is it perfect? By no means. I haven’t figured out how to get the really pretty loopy design you see other people do & I’ve created a few wonky curves but it is good enough for me & Im getting better as I go along. I have to start & stop a lot but have done a whole row at once a couple times which is satisfying. I’ve ripped out a lot of stitches but because I didn’t care for the pattern I was making not that the stitches were bad. My stitch length is not very even but I’ve heard that is really hard to control when free motion quilting.
Quilting
I’m having a hard time controlling the excess quilt stuffed to the side while quilting but found clipping it helps. I’ve also learned when I start a new bobbin or if I’ve rethreaded everything, its worth doing a few inches on my practice piece to make sure everything is moving smoothly & then restarting on my quilt. I was starting to really enjoy it but when my shoulders started to hurt I knew it was time to set it aside for the day.

Handmade 365 2010- My goal is to spend time everyday working on something handmade for a year & photograph it.

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15 years ago by in Needlecraft , Quilting | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
4 Comments to #55 – Success
    • Diane
    • Looks great! I found that just doodling my curves on paper helps in terms of getting those curves you want. It kinda gets the mind in gear if you know what I mean.

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