So You Want to Machine Quilt – Part Two

Welcome back! If you missed my first post on prepping your quilt for machine quilting on your home machine, find it here.

This week we move to the sewing machine to quilt. I will share my technique and tips on machine quilting, which includes prepping your sewing area and choosing a quilt design. There will also be a mini video tutorial at the end of this post demonstrating what I’ve covered. Like I said last week, there are many other resources on machine quilting with your home machine, especially if you want to quilt larger quilts. It never hurts to gather more information than you think you need. They may have tips I haven’t covered that will be helpful in your education on machine quilting.

Prepare To Quilt

Step 1: Before you begin it is a good idea to ready your machine and sewing area for machine quilting. If you can, try to have large area to your left and behind your machine (photo below) especially if your project is a larger quilt.

This will help to support the weight of the quilt to the side and behind your machine to alleviate stress to your arm and shoulder muscles. Also, if you don’t support the quilt, the weight of the portion of it not being stitched can pull on the area you are stitching and create problems with your stitching and design.

If you don’t have a large table where you can set your machine, you can create this extra space by placing another table behind your sewing table or placing an ironing board there, lowered to the same level as your sewing table. 

Step 2: Change your needle. Odds are, you haven’t changed it as often as you should. It’s best to start with a fresh needle when beginning a quilting project so you are assured there will be no fabric snags, larger holes punched in your fabric or snapping thread. All of these things can happen with a needle that has been used too much. I recommend switching from your universal needle to one that is specifically for quilting.

These needles are sharper than the universal needle allowing it to penetrate through the 3 layers of the quilt sandwich.

Step 3: Choose the quilting foot for your machine. I mostly do free-motion, meandering machine quilting. For that, I recommend an open toe darning foot.

With this foot, you drop your feed dogs and move all the layers of your quilt sandwich with your hands. Dropping the feed dogs insures there is no drag on the bottom layer of the quilt sandwich while you are moving it. This is another area where you can look for advice from other machine quilters. They may recommend other machine feet to use for free motion quilting.

Another foot I just recently started to use is a walking foot. This is a great one to use if you want to do straight line quilting, like a grid or stitch in the ditch and it’s definitely recommended by most machine quilters. Here’s my walking foot:

Special “teeth” on the bottom of this foot mimic the feed dogs under your quilt to evenly feeds all three layers of your quilt sandwich as you quilt. This helps also to eliminate puckers or rumples on the backing that you could get with just a standard foot on top.

If you do not have one for your machine, I recommend purchasing one. It will be worth it as you can use it for quilting and also for attaching binding evenly.

Additional Tips

Tip #1: For the type of quilting I do – free motion with a darning foot – I recommend these quilting gloves:

These gloves help me grip and hold taunt the three layers of the quilt sandwich so I can move it as one under the needle.

Tip #2: This is a time-saver tip: wind several bobbins with the thread you are using on the project so you can quickly change out a bobbing that has run out. 

Time to Quilt Tips

Tip #1: Prepare your design ahead of time. For deciding on a quilt design, I have a trick. I either print a copy of one of the quilt blocks in the quilt top or draw one out on a piece of paper. Once I do that, I will draw out a quilt design pattern that I can follow on each block! Here’s an example of one of my drawings below:

Once I have the design I like on paper, I use an erasable marking pencil to mark the blocks. The arrows on my drawing (I do not mark those on the quilt) show which direction to stitch to make this design in one continuous pass. You can also just do an overall meandering pattern like this below:

The overall pattern above is often referred to as “loops and stars”.

So whether you choose a custom design within each block or an overall motif, it’s good to decide before you have the quilt under the needle to save frustration. I have picked out machine quilting stitches before… and it’s not fun!

Here’s a couple of recent photos of quilts I have quilted to show some other patterns. In the first photo on the left is a free motion paisley design and on the right is a free motion leaf design I often use in borders.

Tip#2: To develop the ability to do designs like above, I recommend making a practice “sandwich” with scrap fabric and batting. It’s also a good way to practice quilting if it’s been awhile since you’ve machine quilted. Here’s one of my practice “sandwiches”:

You can see I was practicing my paisley design on the above sample piece. Practicing designs and the flow of the movement of the quilt sandwich is another advantage to this tip. This helps you make sure there are no skipped stitches, uneven stitches or “eye-lashing” of stitches on curves and helps you to match your stitching speed (speed of your machine) with your hand movement of the quilt sandwich to prevent those things.

Tip #3: Start quilting your project from the center, working your way out. That way any fabric that shifts will shift towards the edges of the quilt top and can be adjusted as needed instead of bunching up in the center.

Tip#4: Take breaks when quilting. About every 15 minutes of quilting, I stand up, stretch my shoulders and hands. You’d be surprised how tensed up your muscles get when you are quilting. If you take breaks to stretch, you will not fatigue quite so much. It will also help you not to make mistakes.

Quilting Steps

 I will now describe the quilting steps. At the end of this post will be my quilting mini video tutorial showing these steps.

• The feed dogs on your machine need to be dropped. See your owner’s manual on how to do that if you have not done it before.
• Next, pull your bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. To do this, put your threaded needle down in the spot where you want to begin and drop your presser foot. Tap your foot peddle so the needle comes back up, pull on the end of the top thread and this will draw the bobbin thread to the top of the quilt. This is so the bobbin thread does not get caught in the stitching on the back and create a mess!
• Start with a few small “locking stitches”. Since your feed dogs are dropped, they are not moving the quilt sandwich …. you have to. So to make these small stitches, just move the quilt top slightly while stitching. Since you are only moving it slightly, the stitches will be very small.
• Once you do these beginning stitches, you can now move on to the motif you have chosen. Be sure to move the quilt top at an even pace matching the speed of your machine. That is how you keep the stitches even (unless you are one of those lucky quilters who have a stitch regulator on your machine!).
• Once you reach the end of your design or are at a place where you need to stop, end with a few small locking stitches again. Snip the threads as close to the quilt top as you can (be careful!). Now you are ready to move on to the next area!

Mini Tutorial Video

So here it is. My quilting mini tutorial on the steps I described above.

 

Well, that’s it for this machine quilting tutorial and tips. I hope it will inspire you to try your hand at this if you haven’t already. Be sure to start out on a small project like a small wall hanging or table runner. If you start out on something too big, you might get frustrated and quit. Feel free to share your tips in the comments below. 

Happy Quilting!
Deanne