stippling question

hi Sara, its free motion, no pattern drawn on to follow as a general rule. i find it tricky. might help if you first use pencil to paper to see how you get on with that. if its not working well on paper, you could try making swirly loops, that way you can cross lines with glee, unlike stippling which is not supposed to have any lines crossed. thats the bit i find tricky. i just love crossing the line. :)) cheers, jeanne

If you mark the lines you will make yourself crazy twice -- first marking them and second trying to follow them. Just take a deep breath, relax, and go for it. You will develop your own style of stippling -- it's almost like handwriting. Some people are curvy, some angular ...

If you are relaxed and let your fingertips move the quilt around and find a "speed and feed" that you are comfortable with you will be fine. Ignore all the books that say "you must machine quilt at high speed" and the ones that say "you must machine quilt at low speed" and find a speed that doesn't have you wild eyed and grasping the quilt for dear life or one that is so slow that your stitches look like basting. I find that I control the machine speed better if have a bare foot on the foot pedal rather than wear a shoe -- OK when it is cold I do wear a sock sometimes. Make sure your chair is high enough so that you are not reaching up to the quilt/machine and every so often stand up, rotate your shoulders, reach your arms up and streeeeeeeeeeeeetch. Try to remember to breathe occasionally. Keep your self criticism to a minimum!

Remember it is supposed to be fun.

Ellen

I assume you mean that you're trying free motion quilting, because you could of course stitch in the ditch or any other straight line design you want without dropping the feeddogs. I just started free motion quilting for the first time too. Someone shared this site with me, which has a helpful little instructional video:

Lynn

Sara Lorimer wrote:

I don't know what stitching in the ditch means (this is my second quilt; all is new), but I found I can't do quilting on my machine with the feeddogs raised. I tried it on a sample sandwich, and it just sewed in one place -- the cloth didn't move along at all. I _want_ to quilt in a straight line, so if you have any advice I'd appreciate it.

The machine sews thick material fine, as far as I've tried it, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

Hmmmm, Sara. Let's see if we've got all this. You're using a practice sample. Great. You want to sew a straight line. It sews thick fabric just fine. With the feed dogs up - it doesn't move. Right? Very peculiar. Is everything else going okay? If you remove the practice sandwich and slip in just two layers of plain fabric - does it all go - or do you maybe have it set for running a bobbin? Is the thread running from the spool hung somewhere? Assuming all is going okay, and I do hate to be so technical here - but maybe it's set for very fine work, like a seam in batiste. There's a screw, button, thing at the top of your SM straight up above where the needle is that adjusts for pressure and might let your SM ease up for a looser feed. Other than that, we'll wait for the experts. Polly

"Sara Lorimer" wrote > I don't know what stitching in the ditch means (this is my second quilt;

Which foot did you use? Roberta in D

"Sara Lorimer" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:1h6y>

I forgot to ask Sara the most important question. Are you remembering to put the foot down? It's hard to tell if it is when it has layers of fabric and batting under it. I usually check that the foot is down at least twice to be sure. It can make a terrible mess if you forget. Polly

I'm not sure what you mean by 'a big foot' - would it be a walking foot? They're great for just about everything except stippling - the reason being - to use a walking foot, the feed dogs must be up - they are the greatest asset to owning a sewing machine in my opinion. To stipple - I use an embroidery foot (and I believe that is what is recommended by most teachers), then you put your feed dogs down, your presser foot lever down (tho' it will not actually go alllll the way down to the fabric), then with a hand on each side of your fabric and a medium heavy foot on the pedal, just start moving your fabric around in swirls, funny stars, flowers - whatever design you'd feel like doing. Don't think too much about it - just do it - you'll get better and better with practice. Good luck. Hope I've explained it clearly.

Shar>

I'll bet she meant this:

You beat me to it. Yup, that's what I meant.

Oh - welllll - that looks very much like an embroidery foot - just a lot more colourful than mine. :-))

Sharon (N.B.) ................................................................

"Big Foot" is a brand name for a free motion quilting foot. You can also use a darning foot; it is basically the same. Both allow you to move the fabric in any direction while stitching with the feed dogs down. Both could also be used for free motion embroidery.

Julia in MN

An open toe foot works just fine in a pinch. I don't recommend a walking foot unless you are doing straight - in the ditch type - qulting. Breaks a lot of needles.

You can use a double layer of craft felt (the cheap stuff is just fine, may need a triple layer though) to do warm ups and test thread tension. I learned that in a class from Robbie Ecklow at PIQF this year.

I often skipped the warm up, to my quilt's detriment :-(, because I didn't want to bother making the test sandwiches and using up perfectly good 12" pieces of muslin and batting. Now I just stock up on craft felt when it goes on sale at Joanns and my quilts are much happier :-)

Anne in CA annerudolph AT comcast DOT net "It's not having what you want; it's wanting what you've got." -- Sheryl Crow

Susan Torrens wrote: