| As this was the first time that I would be quilting with my new machine, walking foot or no, I decided to sandwich a little baby tester quilt that was literally just two pieces of fabric with batting in between to get used to the foot. I glue basted at home and it took about 10 minutes. Unlike the Sea Says quilt, I did iron as I went along. And afterwards I seriously had to clean my iron. In retrospect I might just leave them to ‘air’ dry and not press- or use a Teflon sheet to protect the iron from the glue soaking through the top. (I have since done both. If I can leave the quilt alone for 3-4 hours I will let it dry. With ironing with a Teflon sheet I still let it dry, but it doesn’t need the longer timespan. One side has these colorful little fish in almost straight lines and the other side was small sea horses. Each line of fish was roughly half an inch wide, and I just sewed from side to side straight down between the rows and used leader/enders to sew on and off with. If you don’t know what a leader/ender is please see post this from Just Get it Done Quilts: https://youtu.be/-LBfRKRYBok ; or Katrina Kahn’s tutorial https://youtu.be/u2mPd1NlVDo . And, of course, Bonnie Hunter has a number of books on the subject and creates wonderful ‘second quilts’ while sewing on another- https://quiltville.blogspot.com/. |
A walking foot helps feed the top and bottom at the same rate and comes with most machines.
My stitch length was 3.5 to start with but I would change to 2.5 for my leader/enders. Sometimes I forgot to change it so I would either sew the l/e at 3.5 or sewed the quilt at 2.5. I only resewed the leader/enders when I sewed at 3.5.
For the Sea Says: Dive On In! I sewed at 3.0 for the whole thing. You don’t want a too tiny stitch length with the walking foot. If it the stitching needs removing, you could rip the quilt while ripping out the thread and need to repair the spot. Unlike piecing the quilt seams, quilting with a larger stitch length is great. Just don’t use the long basting stitch as it will give the finished quilt moving room.
I sewed onto a leader first (to catch any thread nest) and then chose to start in the middle of the baby quilt and quilted between two lines of fish and sewed out to the edge.
Then sewed off the quilt edge and onto an ender.
I turned the quilt so I could now quilt in the opposite direction and chose a line 7 fish away (this was random, I just wanted to be able to hold the sandwich with quilting but didn’t want to do detail work at this time.
The ender became a leader as I sewed onto the quilt, across, then off onto another ender.
I worked my way down the quilt side sewing every 7 rows of fish. Once I got to the end I went back in the middle and finished off that seam, then quilted down every 7th row in the opposite direction.
At each row I turned the sandwich so I was sewing in the opposite direction than the previous stitch line. This helps to keep the sandwich ‘square’ and doesn’t shuffle the bottom layer out of line with the top layer. You sometimes you see this creep when you sew long fabric pieces repeatedly from one end. Eventually the seams curve and will not be straight. Going back and forth helps to level out the creep. While a walking foot can help eliminate most of the creep some creep will happen as the top and bottom feed dogs are not pulling exactly even all the time.
Now that I had the quilting set and the sandwich would not be moving (or creeping), and the pieces would no longer shift, I sewed in smaller increments between the initial 7 fish rows. Sewing between 1, 2, or 3 rows of fish, up one row, down another, and back again.
Each one I used an ender unless it was just 1 row as that was close enough. Once finished, I squared it up and bound the top. Aren’t these fish cute? This baby quilt was going to a niece’s new baby, due in two weeks. Sometimes, the simplest quilts are the best when time is short and you can’t get more simple than this one.
Once I sewed that little quilt I felt confident enough in the glue basting to start away from the exact middle on the Sea Says: Dive On In! quilt and work outwards.