Machine Quilting–A Love-Hate Relationship

Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 4:05 pm

When I left you yesterday, I was considering how I wanted to quilt Sarah’s baby quilt. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with machine quilting. I love how fast it is (this from someone who has hand-quilted a king-sized quilt–never again!), but I don’t really feel like I have much control over the process–my sewing machine is going a zillion miles an hour, and I’m just along for the ride! And barely hanging on, at that!

Enter the new blog I just discovered–365 Days of Free Motion Quilting Filler Designs, by Leah Day. Leah has given herself an incredible challenge: to design a new free motion filler design every day for a whole year.

Leah herself asks the question, “Can I Create A New Free Motion Filler Design Every Day For A Year?” Well, it looks like she’s doing it, and doing a great job of it, too. She started in August of this year. Not only is she coming up with all these cool designs, she also has a video of how to do each one.

She makes samples of each design, and keeps them in transparent sleeves in a three-ring binder. Then when she’s ready to start machine quilting, she can just pull out her binder and choose what designs to use.

So my goal is to start with Day One, and work through a design each day. I’ll end up with a binder full of designs, too. If you’re like me, when you’re faced with the wide open spaces of a quilt needing to be quilted, you draw a blank as to what to do. This will help solve that problem, and I’ll become a better machine quilter, too.

Leah also has tips for setting up your sewing area, and sells quilting supplies, too.

Feather stitching along sashing; will use Shadow Wave to quilt the turquoise cat sashing.

Oh yeah, what am I doing with Sarah’s quilt? I dug up my trusty walking foot, and started out by using a feather stitch instead of quilting in the ditch. A couple of years ago, I saw somebody in a quilt shop in Gatlinburg, TN, using a machine embroidery stitch to quilt with, instead of just doing ditch quilting. I was intrigued, and I’ve wanted to try it ever since. And it does look pretty cool. I’m using yellow thread on the back, and fuschia on the front.

I’m also going to use Leah’s Shadow Waves on the sashing and borders. I haven’t decided what to do with the cat blocks yet, but that will come. At this point I’m thinking of stitching in the ditch along the log cabin strips in a spiral shape to the cat picture in the middle.