Focus on Free Motion Quilting, Heart Table Runner

Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the "Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image. 

I finished quilting 8 of the big blocks on my king size quilt and decided to take a little break from it. My quilting gloves are over 11 years old; they have plastic dots on the palms and fingers for gripping the quilt, but the dots (especially the ones on the fingertips) are losing their grip/slight tackiness and that makes it difficult to move that big quilt while I'm quilting it. So I ordered new quilting gloves and am also continuing to practice drawing my feathers.

I have been reading up on how Victoria quilted her king size Christmas Crosses quilt in 2010 (she also used a home table-top machine) and I also put Diane Gaudynski's book, Guide to Machine Quilting on hold at the library. I'm pretty sure I will quilt long feathers in the sashing spaces and then do echo stitching around them to fill up the rest of the space. As far as the wide borders go, I'm stil not sure how I will quilt them. I think it's worth taking it slow so I can figure out what I really want to do on this quilt.

The other night I was looking through my big bin of quilt fabric and found this table runner that I started last year. At the time I had thought I would hand quilt it but I am a big procrastinator when it comes to hand stitching and I never got around to it. So I decided this is the perfect time to finish it. I got the background quilted in tiny free motion loops. (The gloves are not as big of a deal on a small project like this.)

 

I am going to finish up the quilting in the hearts but there is only so much light on a January day here so I wanted to get a photo before it's too dark. I will use red and hot pink thread in the hearts, maybe echo quilting in spirals into the centers of the hearts.

Have you been practicing your free motion quilting? What are you working on? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks to the FFMQ sponsors!

 

Connecting Threads
 

 

Hawthorne Threads

Fat Quarter Shop

Here's the prize drawing information FYI:

*Be thinking about what you want to do for your free motion quilted project for the prize drawing at the end of the month. It needs to be finished this month but can already be started if needed. The project could be a small mini-quilt or a large quilt, or something in between, it’s up to you.

*About the prizes--there will be a link-up at the end of the month where participants can link to a blog post or flickr photo sharing their completed free motion quilted project. The link-up will be open for 24 hours and then winners will be chosen randomly from those who enter.

 

Chicken Quilt

A little while back I got an email from Cindy, who's a member of a yahoo group about chickens. She was asking about my chicken quilt block tutorial and the chicks I used in my quilt for DQS8 way back when. Turns out that another member of her group, Karen, made a chicken quilt using my chicken block! I think it is super cute and got Karen's permission to post the pictures on my blog:

I really like that egg fabric in the border. And the colorful chickens.

She sent close-ups of a couple of the chickens:

Karen says "the green one is molting." Too funny! I love the stitched legs and beady eyes, too.

If you want to make a project with this quilt block you can find the tutorial here. The chicks that I made for this quilt are made from a pattern in the book "A Quilter's Ark." Do you have chickens? How do you like them? Maybe one day (when we get into our own house again) we will try having chickens. Or maybe I'll just make my own chicken quilt.

FFMQ Guest Post, Amy from AmyLouWho

Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the "Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image. 

Hi Sew Inspired readers! I'm amylouwho and blog over at www.amylouwhosews.com.  I was flattered that Vicki asked me to share my experience with free motion quilting!  I am no expert, still a beginner, but have learned a few things along the way that I'm happy to share with you!

I was spoiled from the get-go with free motion quilting, because my mom and her sisters have a long-arm quilting machine and that was the first way I ever did any free motion quilting.  It was AMAZING!! That was over 10 years ago before I was really sewing again and I can't remember if I ever did more than one little baby quilt. Which I don't have a picture of.  Sad, I know.

Fast forward several years and I started sewing again when I started my own family.  Most of the quilts I made early on were quilted by my aunt or my mom or by me with just with some straight lines on my little Bernina and my mom's walking foot.  (I still need to acquire one of those!!) 

My first project that I actually free motion quilted, by myself, on my little machine was my bird quilt from my very first online quilting bee, just a little over a year ago.  It was a daunting task, because I loved the quilt but didn't want to ruin it.  I decided to quilt each block individually as I did some straight line quilting in the sashing.

I practiced loop-de-loops, stippling, and even came up with my own leaf design. 

 

Focusing on a 14" block was a lot better than trying to look at the huge quilt as a whole.  I used a variegated green thread to quilt with which was great on all of the greens, but the darkest part of the thread really shows my imperfections on the white.  I would probably use white thread if I were to do it again.

Something I started making to practice my free motion skills were quilted dishmats. 

 

Basically, a piece of cotton, cotton batting, and chenille. Spray basted together, quilted, and serged off on the edges.

They are super easy to maneuver in your machine for practice, make great gifts, a quick finish and a nice way to add some color to your kitchen.

Another great way to practice free motion quilting, and quilting in general is by making mini quilts! I made my first mini-quilt for the Spicing up the Kitchen Swap on Flickr last year.

and another after I attended the Sewing Summit last fall.

I took Allison's (of Cluck, Cluck, Sew) free motion quilting class and learned a few new tricks and basically gained confidence that I might actually know what I was doing.  I liked how she talked about doing your quilting in rows up and down your quilt.  I always tended to go wherever and sometimes you quilt yourself into a corner, literally!  The mini quilts are so satisfying and quick.  And yes, it IS STILL QUILTING!! yeah! I have a serious problem finishing things in a timely manner!  So something small and quickly finished feels great!

I just finished a quilt a few weeks ago for a Christmas gift.   Start to finish 3 weeks!  It was a Christmas miracle!

It is 72x72 finished, so it was pretty large in my little machine, and I had anxiety half-way through the quilting that I wasn't going to like it.  And then I washed it and dried and it.  And it was great!  Not perfect, but that's okay!

The hardest part of any new thing for me is the starting.  Once I start quilting, I have to keep going.  And once I'd free motioned a whole quilt, other projects seemed less scary.  The thing that surprises me the most about quilting is that halfway through every large project I've done, I hate whatever it is I'm doing, and wished I had a long-arm.  I'm so busy focusing on each tiny stitch and all of the imperfections that I see that I lose sight of what the whole quilt will look like quilted, washed and dried.  The stitches disappear, the quilt becomes crinkly and soft, and the overall look is one of pretty coziness.  I need to remind myself of that while I'm in the midst of the quilting!!

The biggest things I've learned are:
1. Don't kill yourself over perfection.  Very few people, if any, will analyze each stitch the way you will while quilting.
2. Use thread that matches the lightest fabric in your quilt.
3. I love my quilting gloves - they help keep my grip on the quilt.
4. Put the foot pedal all the way down.  Going faster actually helps keep your stitches more even.  This comes with practice, but I find my quilting always looks better when I'm moving my quilt slowly and the needle is moving quickly.
5. If your machine doesn't sit flush with your table, sit in a taller chair, or an a booster (I put my kid's booster upside down) to keep from hunching your shoulders up to your machine while you sew.  I find this helps any time I'm spending a lot of time at my machine.
6.  Practice, practice, practice!  The more you do it, the better you get, and the more confident you will be!
7. Have fun! 

I would encourage any of you who are intimidated by free motion quilting to just start.  Find some scraps and batting and just play!  Have fun with it!  After all for a lot of us this is a hobby that should be fun, not stressful!  No get going and make something pretty and have fun while you are doing it!

***********
It's Vicki now, thanks so much to Amy for this post. I love your Christmas quilt and am very impressed with the quick turnaround. I can't wait to see what you make next! Please stop by Amy's blog and check it out; she's the host of Sew & Tell Friday which is a fun link up party occurring on many Fridays and encouraging us to finish up and show off our projects!

Also, I want to encourage you to post your free motion quilting practice or projects on the link-up from Tuesday's post. I'd love to hear about what you're working on!


And finally thanks again to the Focus on Free Motion Sponsors!

 

Connecting Threads
 

 

Hawthorne Threads

Fat Quarter Shop

Here's the prize drawing information fine print:

*Be thinking about what you want to do for your free motion quilted project for the prize drawing at the end of the month. It needs to be finished this month but can already be started if needed. The project could be a small mini-quilt, a large quilt, or something in between, it’s up to you. 

*About the prizes--there will be a link-up at the end of the month where you can link to a blog post or flickr photo sharing a completed free motion quilted project from this month. The link-up will be open for 24 hours and then winners will be chosen randomly from those who enter.

 

Focus on Free Motion Quilting--tension and sketching

Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the "Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image. 

Hi everyone, welcome to week 2 of Focus on Free Motion Quilting! I spent some time in the last few days working on basting and quilting my king size quilt. It is challenging but I'm breaking it up into chunks to make it more doable. More on that in a bit.

April and I exchanged some emails last week about tension, and I wanted to address that here on the blog in case anyone else is having tension problems while free motion quilting. I didn't mention this in last week's post, but I do adjust my top thread tension when I free motion quilt; this keeps the top thread from getting pulled to the back when I do loops and curves. It took me a while to feel like I could change the tension dial as I was taught as a kid to never touch it! But I realized if I didn't like what happened when I changed it, I could put it back on the default setting and everything would be ok. Here's a picture to show how changing my top thread tension helps with my FMQ tension problems:

This is the bottom of my quilt sandwich, that's where top thread tension issues show up in my experience. I started on the bottom right with my tension at its normal setting. See all the places where the top thread was pulled down to the bottom? (April calls them eyelashes, they kind of look like it.) In the top right area of this photo, you can see where I adjusted the tension dial up to 7 and the top thread was no longer being pulled down. 

April also blogged about her tension issues, and also discussed the success she's had with quilting with her feed dogs up. Her practice free motion quilted leaves look great!

Now about my project: I am quilting a king size quilt in a regular size domestic machine. In order to make this a little easier, I decided to only layer and baste batting into the middle approx. 1/3 of the quilt. After I get that part of the quilt all quilted, I'll hand baste the remaining batting on one side at a time, and baste and quilt those outer sides. I'm quilting the big blocks first and then I'll do the sashing.

I took Elizabeth's advice and sketched out my blocks and how I would quilt each part of them. I have also been practicing drawing my feathers and other quilting designs.

 

I'm going to keep practicing. 

And here are pictures of the blocks I've quilted so far:

Block 1

Block 2

 

Block 3 

What have you been working on? Do you have any questions or tips to share?

Thanks again to the Focus on Free Motion sponsors!

 

Connecting Threads
 

 

Hawthorne Threads

Fat Quarter Shop

Here's the prize drawing information FYI:

*Be thinking about what you want to do for your free motion quilted project for the prize drawing at the end of the month. It needs to be finished this month but can already be started if needed. The project could be a small mini-quilt or a large quilt, or something in between, it’s up to you. Over the next few weeks, I will share some projects that I think would be good for beginning or improving free motion quilting skills. 

*About the prizes--there will be a link-up at the end of the month where participants can link to a blog post or flickr photo sharing their completed free motion quilted project. The link-up will be open for 24 hours and then winners will be chosen randomly from those who enter.

 

Tablet Keeper Blog Tour--Kindle Fire Measurements

Hi everyone! I'm excited to share my version of the Tablet Keeper today! The Trace 'N Create Tablet Keeper template is a versatile pattern that can be made in 3 sizes for electronic tablets or paper tablets. The pattern is in the form of a template on clear plastic with cut-out areas where you can mark cutting lines, elastic placement, and strap placement. 


I was really happy to be asked to participate in this blog tour, but when the template and other materials arrived, I found that the smallest size on the template was still much too big for my Kindle Fire. So I knew I was going to re-size the pattern to fit, but I was a little worried about getting it right.

First, I decided to use some of the fabrics from my Parisville fat quarter set. Here's the initial fabric (and interfacing) pull along with the template & instructions, rectangle rings, strap interfacing, and tablet keeper "shapers" which are hard plastic inserts for making the tablet keeper really sturdy.

   

Next I stewed about making the measurements right for a few days, then re-read the instructions and realized the fabric measurements were pretty much the finished product measurements because the inner and outer layers are sewn together wrong sides together and then it is bound. I came up with the following measurements for the inner and outer fabric layers, along with the two interfacing layers:

8 1/4" tall
11 1/2" wide (or 5 3/4" from the fold--this will make sense if you have the instruction sheet)

I actually made a mistake and cut everything 8" tall and it worked out ok but I think it would be better with that added 1/4".

Here's everything all cut out:

   

(Except I switched to a lighter fusible interfacing and didn't use the heavier interfacing shown here. The very top interfacing in the photo.)

Also, two long strips cut from a fat quarter is *not* enough to bind the whole thing. Cut three strips across the long side of a FQ for your binding. 

After getting everything cut out, I just followed the included instruction sheet and looked at Nancy's blog too for some visual help on making my tablet keeper. A couple other changes I made were the strap length and placement. I made my strap 21", aka the long side of a fat quarter. I should have made it about 1.5" longer. So, my recommended strap length for a Kindle Fire-sized Tablet Keeper is 22.5". Then the velcro placement line needs to be at 5 1/2" and the fold line needs to be at 6 1/2" from the end of the strap. Again, these measurements will make sense if you have the pattern sheet. For the strap placement, I just eyeballed the middle of the cover and put it where I thought it looked good with the print of the fabric.

Some more notes about making my Tablet Keeper: 

*I used my walking foot to attach the firm interfacing (I think it's Peltex, not sure because I've had it for a long time.)

*The strap interfacing is really cool. You fuse it to your strap fabric and it has perforations that make it easy to fold in the sides perfectly. I am totally going to use this stuff next time I make a new bag.

*It would be really easy to add a pocket to the interior left side. I think if you do that you should make sure that whatever you put in it will be covered up completely by the pocket to avoid any scratching of your Kindle or whatever kind of electronic tablet you use.

*Elastic. I used a cut up hair band with non-slip grip stuff on one side, as recommended in the instructions. I am really happy with how securely it holds my Kindle in place.  It was kind of difficult to sew through though, and I recommend you use a ball point needle and stitch really slowly over the elastic. I marked the elastic placement using the template, I just positioned one corner of my tablet keeper on the template at a time, and moved it as necessary to mark all 4 corners.

*Tablet Keeper Shapers. These are the rigid plastic inserts for giving the tablet keeper good sturdy structure. I cut one of the large shapers into two small ones for the front and back of my tablet keeper, using my rotary cutter and ruler. It is not the easiest thing to cut, so be careful and go slow. I would suggest you measure your own tablet keeper for your tablet keeper shaper cutting measurements. My left one was cut to about 5" x 7 1/4" and the right one was a little wider, 5 1/8" x 7 1/4".

*Binding. I opted to sew the binding on the right side (outer side) of the tablet keeper and then hand stitch it down on the inside. 

So here's my finished tablet keeper:

 

It actually turned out better than I thought it would! And it's quite sturdy too. I was worried about all the layers of fabric and interfacing before I sewed it up, thinking it would be too much for such a small cover, but it is just right.

Here it is opened up:

I really like it! If I made it again I think I would only change a few things: I would make it the full 8 1/4" tall I mentioned above. I would be more careful to make it more symmetrical, and I would make the strap a little bit longer too (it is folded over double from the ring to where it connects to the back of the cover and mine wasn't quite long enough to be doubled over that whole length.)


Thanks again to Nancy Zieman for asking me to participate in the tablet keeper blog tour. If you're interested in making your own tablet keeper, be sure to visit the other participating blogs and see how they customized theirs!

Also, don't forget to stop by Nancy's blog to enter to win one of three prize kits she's giving away! (They are really cool prizes, go look!)

January 3 Nancy Zieman http://www.nancyzieman.com/blog

January 4 Amy Ellis http://amyscreativeside.com/

January 5 Sharon Pernes http://craizeecorner.blogspot.com/

January 6 Vicki Christensen http://www.sewinspiredblog.com/

January 9 Joan Hawley http://www.lazygirldesigns.com/blog

January 10 Pat Sloan http://patsloan.typepad.com/

January 11 Eileen Roche http://dzgns.com/blog/

January 12 Liz Hicks http://blogerisms.blogspot.com

January 13 Fran Ortmeyer http://cloverusa.wordpress.com/

January 16 Ilene Miller http://happyvalleyprimitives.blogspot.com/

January 17 Julie Herman http://www.jaybirdquilts.com/

January 18 Jenny Gabriel http://www.sewvacoutletblog.com/

January 19 Natalia Bonner http://www.piecenquilt.blogspot.com/

January 20 Frieda Anderson http://friestyle.blogspot.com/

January 23 Cindy Cloward http://www.rileyblakedesigns.com/blog/

January 24 Beckie Hansen http://www.nancyzieman.com/blog

January 25 Amy Webb http://www.amylouwhosews.com/

January 26 Allie Robertson http://thinkcrafts.com/

January 27 Mary Mulari http://www.nancyzieman.com/blog

January 30 Laura Wasilowski http://artfabrik.blogspot.com/

January 31 Carol Porter http://www.nancyzieman.com/blog

Disclosure: Clover provided the Tablet Keeper template set, strap interfacings, hardware, and tablet keeper shapers for this project.

Also! If you're new here, and interested in Free Motion Quilting, check out Focus on Free Motion Quilting

FFMQ Guest Post, Elizabeth from Such a Sew and Sew

Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the "Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image. 

I cannot count my day complete 'Til needle, thread and fabric meet. –Unknown

Hello, Sew Inspired readers. I'm Elizabeth from Such a Sew and Sew. It is nice to meet you. I'm very honored that Vicki would invite me to guest post about free-motion quilting. At the very least, I hope that I what I have to say will not bore the pants off you. I'm hoping for the best, that you might find something helpful and be at least slightly amused in the process. Off we go then. So. Free-motion quilting. When strung together in that order, those are the three scariest words in the English language. I've been FMQ-ing for a year and a half and in that time I've FMQed 13½ quilts of various sizes. I still have to take a deep breath before I take that first stitch because free-motion quilting is scary, plain and simple. No matter how many times I do it, there is always that worry in the back of my mind that I'm going to mess it up. 

I think the hardest part about FMQ is knowing where to start. If your LQS offers a beginning machine quilting class, that is a good place to start. Keeping your expectations reasonable helps too. I went very simple for my first free-motion quilt because up to that point I'd only done a few small projects in straight lines, with a walking foot. It took me about 10 hours to do a fairly tight meander across a 52" x 68" quilt. It was tedious. I missed dropping off my quilt top at the long-arm quilter and getting it back transformed into something amazing. I saw every single imperfection. I worried the whole time that I had ruined it. I didn't think I would ever want to quilt my own again.

After a trip through the washer, the imperfections seemed to disappear. I was fairly content with my first attempt at FMQ and I even felt kind of fulfilled in making a quilt start to finish. Necessity {i.e. lack of funds} dictated that if I wanted to finish any more quilts, I'd just have to do it myself. So I tried again with loopy flowers on the next quilt. It was an interesting adventure that turned out pretty well. I went back to meandering and straight-line on a couple more quilts and then did some more loopy flowers. I decided to give feathers a try and they didn't come out too badly. I branched out from there, adding in a bit of something new to each quilt, along with the old stand-by favorites. My skills improved, my stitches got more consistent and my quilting got more elaborate. At the end of June 2011, I finished a second snowball quilt, identical to the one I'd started with. This one took about 35 hours to quilt, there wasn't one straight line or meander anywhere on it and I didn't find it tedious to spend all that time at the machine. As a matter of fact, I loved it. I loved free-motion quilting.

So, how did I go from a somewhat iffy edge-to-edge meander to a 35-hour custom quilt? Practice. Not the answer you thought I'd give, right? You were hoping I had a magic answer. An answer that would make free-motion quilting easier and more appealing. It really does come down to practice, which can be discouraging and frustrating {my first attempts were craptastic}, if not down-right boring. But I'll tell you a secret. The key to great free-motion quilting is learning how to make a smooth curve. Once you learn how to make pretty curves, you can do pretty much anything you want with FMQ.

The best place to practice curves is by doing a meander. I started with a paper and pencil. It helps tremendously to get the motion down if you doodle it out on paper. Imagine making little bunny silhouettes—two ears and a nose. Or picture puzzle pieces. I filled four or five 3" x 5" notecards with a super-tight meander. On a quilt it would be called a micro-stipple. Even though I couldn't {and still can't} quilt it that small, practicing at a small scale helps your brain to learn the motion. Once you've got it down on paper, move to a practice quilt sandwich. Or three. And then when you feel confident {or even if you don't} move to an actual quilt. Start with a quilt you're not really attached to, like two 1-yard pieces of fabric you pulled out of the bargain bin and sandwiched together. Then, if you don't love it when you're done it can be donated.

I probably did four or five quilts with an edge-to-edge meander before I felt like I could try anything else. When I wanted to try something new, I sketched out the design on paper over and over and tried it out on a practice sandwich before moving to my real quilt. I not only sketch out different quilting designs before I try them, I sketch out how I want to quilt each quilt before I begin. It helps me to organize my ideas, lets me practice moving in one continuous line, and gives me a framework to work within {I'm a color-inside-the-lines kind of gal} when I move to the actual quilt. And is easier to erase a sketch than it is to unpick quilting. This is a quilt I'm working on right now. My goal is to finish it by the end of January. I sketched out the blocks on grid paper, scanned it and enlarged and printed the images of each of the blocks. I made a sketch for each block and then I printed out a smaller copy of the entire quilt. I transferred each block design to the thumbnail size copies in the full quilt layout. When I quilt each block, I refer to my sketches. Sometimes I follow them exactly and sometimes I decide to go with something different. Not every sketch or every quilt I do is this elaborate. The quilt is a pinwheel sampler, so I thought it might be fun to have it also be a quilting sampler.

I asked Vicki if she wanted me to talk about anything in specific and she said she'd like to know my favorite design to quilt. For me, quilting should compliment the design of the quilt, not cover it up. And so that is what I work towards in my quilting. My favorite design to quilt is a row of swirls in the sashing. I use it a lot.

Notice a trend?

Yep. Swirls in every single quilt.

Thanks for letting me bend your ear a little bit about something I really love! If you don't love FMQ yet, with a little practice I hope that you will. xo -E

*************

Hi, it's Vicki again! Thanks so much, Elizabeth, for such a thorough post about your free motion quilting process. I am amazed by your attention to detail and the dedication you put into your quilting!

Elizabeth and I have followed each others' blogs for quite a while now and we were finally able to meet each other last summer at a fun blogger meet-up. She brought her beautiful snowball quilt; it is truly an amazing quilt. I hope you feel like some of Elizabeth's advice will be helpful to you in your free motion quilting adventures. I am gearing up to quilt my king size flea market fancy quilt and I want to quilt some feathers in the borders and sashing. I'm actually really nervous about it but I'm going to start practicing drawing feathers and see how it goes. Please be sure to stop by Elizabeth's blog, Such a Sew and Sew, and get to know her better. I really like the heart table runner she made and showed off in this post.

You can find all the Focus on Free Motion Quilting posts linked here. Feel free to comment with your questions or FMQ tips. Are you brand new to FMQ? Or wanting to improve your skills? What are you going to make this month?

Finally, I wanted to mention the sponsors for Focus on Free Motion Quilting. Thanks for your support!

 

 Connecting Threads 

 

Hawthorne Threads

Fat Quarter Shop

Blogger's Choice Fat Quarter Bundle

Do you already know about this? Laura from Quokka Quilts has joined up with Fat Quarter Shop with a fun contest. All you have to do to enter is go through the wonderful selection of fabrics on fatquartershop.com, and choose 12 prints and 3 solids. The winners get a half yard set of their chosen fabrics. So here's my picks:

   

There are a lot of good turquoise, orange, and gray fabrics available right now. I love the gray damask in the top left corner. And the houndstooth prints too. And also the dots. Ok that's all for now. Cross your fingers for me! Or go make your own entry, if you haven't yet, and cross them for yourself!

Focus on Free Motion Quilting!

Links to all of the blog posts in this series are located in the "Focus on Free Motion Quilting" tab below my blog header image. 

Welcome to Focus on Free Motion Quilting! I decided to host this series on my blog a few weeks ago, hoping that a few people who have been wanting to learn how to free motion quilt, or improve their free motion quilting skills, will feel like they have the information they need to get started. And then maybe practice and get better at it. Free motion quilting can be intimidating when you are new at it but it's something that I believe anyone can learn, if you're willing to put in the time to practice! So, for the rest of January here at Sew Inspired Blog we will work on learning how to start free motion quilting and improve our quilting. I have some wonderful guest bloggers lined up that will share their tips and tricks for free motion quilting and there will be some really cool prizes at the end of the month for those who complete a project that is free motion quilted with a home sewing machine.

To begin, here's a list of things you need to have on hand to start free motion quilting.
*Quilt sandwich (two layers of fabric with batting in the middle)
*Quilting pins for basting (or you can use spray baste or fusible batting, or even baste with needle and thread)
*Sewing machine with free motion quilting foot or darning foot 
*Thread
*Quilting gloves--you can buy gloves specifically for quilting or use clean gardening gloves if they have plastic grippy stuff on them. I've also used disposable cleaning gloves for quilting when I was at my mom's house and didn't have my regular quilting gloves on hand.


Here is a basic practice quilt sandwich prepared for quilting:

If you are brand new to free motion quilting, you might want to use some fabric you don't really care a lot about for practice. You can use whatever fabric you have for quilting, just try to choose something that you will be ok with making mistakes on. I didn't measure this but it's about 11" square.


To set up my sewing machine, I thread it, attach my darning foot, and lower my feed dogs. I have only quilted with my feed dogs down, but Leah from the Free Motion Quilting Project has written about why it's ok to quilt with them up. This is something that it's totally ok to experiment with, especially if you have a sewing machine that doesn’t have feed dogs that drop. Go ahead and try quilting with them up and see what happens.


Free motion quilting is basically like drawing on your quilt using your needle and thread as the pen and your quilt as the paper. The difference is that you move the fabric, which would be like moving the paper if you continue the pen/paper analogy. So here's what you need to do to start quilting:


Put your fabric under the needle, lower your presser foot, and using the hand wheel take one stitch down and up. Gently tug on the top thread and pull the bobbin thread to the top of your quilt sandwich. Take about 3 stitches in one place to anchor your threads. Now you can start quilting. Put on your quilting gloves and remove any pins that are very close to your needle, and start stitching!

I suggest trying stippling or loops to start. Stippling is just nice smooth wavy/bumpy lines that fill a space, typically without crossing over previous stitching. But don't worry about that for now. Experiment with different speeds with your foot pedal and moving the quilt sandwich slower or faster with your hands. You might find that you need to make the machine go faster, or your hands slower, than you originally thought. Try to get your stitches a uniform length, not too short and not too long.

Other things you can try are writing your name in cursive or doing wavy lines or loopy lines. Just practice, and know that your quilting will improve the more you do it. I did my first free motion quilting over 11 years ago and I am still improving with every project I make.

If you want to read a more detailed free motion quilting tutorial, here's the one I wrote up over 4 years ago. I was using my older machine to quilt then and this tutorial also has information about how I roll up larger quilts to do the quilting. I know some people don't like to roll their quilts, but it works well for me. 


So here's the plan for the rest of the month:
*There will be one Focus on Free Motion Quilting post from me and one from a guest blogger each week. 
*I welcome your suggestions and/or questions about free motion quilting. Feel free to ask questions or add suggestions in the comments, and if you want to write your own blog post about free motion quilting, please send me a link. I'd love to read it, and share it with those who are following along here. 
*You can use my button in the right sidebar if you want to link to Focus on Free Motion Quilting on your blog.
*Be thinking about what you want to do for your free motion quilted project for the prize drawing at the end of the month. It needs to be finished this month but can already be started if needed. The project could be a small mini-quilt or a large quilt, or something in between, it’s up to you. Over the next few weeks, I will share some projects that I think would be good for beginning or improving free motion quilting skills. 
*About the prizes--there will be a link-up at the end of the month where participants can link to a blog post or flickr photo sharing their completed free motion quilted project. The link-up will be open for 24 hours and then winners will be chosen randomly from those who enter.
*I will update this post with links to all the future Focus on Free Motion posts so they will be easy to find.


Finally, I want to thank the sponsors who have donated generous prizes!

 

The prize from Connecting Threads will be a set of four cones of Essential Pro polyester thread in Natural.

 

Hawthorne Threads is providing a gift certificate for $50 to their shop.

And the prizes from Fat Quarter Shop will be three $50 gift certificates to their shop!

Reflections + Made in 2011

Hi friends! It's almost the New Year, time to think about the year past and make a whole bunch of resolutions I'm not going to keep. Or, maybe this year will be different. I've bought my copy of the 2012 Workbook and Planner from the Goddess Guidebook site, I've started filling it out, and I'm planning on using it to help me plan out my projects and goals for the year.

Sew, Mama, Sew has a year-end questionnaire and I decided to share my thoughts on some of their questions. But first, the Made in 2011 Mosaic! Here are a bunch of my projects from the past year:

 

(If you want to see any of the individual photos bigger, click the mosaic to be taken to flickr where you can see the links to each photo, ok?)

Onto the questions....
Looking back at the 2011 sewing scene, what trends stand out in your mind?
The Kona and Habitat challenges within the various Modern Quilt Guild branches, rainbows and bright colors. Projects including both hand and machine quilting. 


What were some of your favorite things related to sewing this past year? 
Getting a little more creative with my free motion quilting.
 
What did you make that you’re most proud of?
I finished up my first PDF quilt pattern; it's called Ruffle Crush. Writing and making the pattern took forever and I'm glad I finally got it done. I have a couple more ideas for patterns that I'd like to get written up soon.

 

What sewn projects have you seen this year that you absolutely love?

This pair of quilts by Amy and gooma8x, seen on flickr. They collaborated to make this intricate and beautiful pair of quilts; I love the colors and the detail and someday I would love to be part of a similar project.
 
Do you have a favorite sewing book or pattern from the past year to recommend?I got Material Obsession II this year and I think it's a great book, really one of the more creative newer quilting books in my opinion. I also got a copy of Natural Patchwork by Suzuko Koseki, and love the simple cute projects included in that book.

Are there any trends you’re over and done with?
Don't hate me, yellow and gray. It's just not my thing.  


What are your thoughts about social media? How is it going for you? What do you love or hate?
I still love reading blogs and I enjoy the feeling I get of actually glimpsing part of the author's life. I like pinterest for the eye candy, but it gets too overwhelming for me very quickly. I guess I like the stories behind projects and pinterest doesn't provide that.
 
Did you have a favorite fabric collection or print in 2011?
Not really. I have a good rainbow of stash fabrics that I enjoy sewing from. I still really like Tula Pink's Neptune, and I only ever had a honey bun from that line (remember those?)--maybe that one should be reprinted some day.
 
What do you predict for 2012 in the sewing industry?
Popular fabric colors are changing to more muted colors, people are trending towards using offwhite, cream, or tan backgrounds instead of stark white. Orange and blue/aqua will continue to be a popular combination in quilting. Someone else said more quilters will branch out into sewing clothing; I think that's probably true. I still wish we could get some more clear blue blues and green greens (as opposed to lime green and baby blue or aqua) in newer fabric collections. Like the blues and greens from the Katie Jump Rope collection.

Can you tell us what to expect from you in 2012? Any big projects or life-changing goals?
Sewing wise, my goals are to continue to whittle down the UFO list, to make Dan's new quilt and Laura's baby quilt and finish J's quilt and my king size quilt (machine quilting it myself!), continue submitting project ideas to magazines, and finish more PDF patterns to sell on my own. Also to make and donate at least 3 quilts to charity.

As far as blogging, I'm hosting Focus on Free Motion Quilting next month (starting on January 3!) and would like to do a series here on the blog on how to sew clothing from patterns later in the year.