Before quilting up my neon quilt I decided to test out some different methods of quilting. One of the first methods I tried was free motion.
I’ve done stippling before using the longarm quilter but not using my home machine. The sample above was done on my Husqvarna with the darning foot (because I don’t have the actual free motion foot). I didn’t play around with the stitch tension too much. I’ve since read that you can decrease the thread tension to make the stitches a bit nicer. The machine is in the shop right now (first time since I bought it!) so maybe I’ll try that when I get it back, but not sure.
Next I decided to try on my Singer which has a free motion foot included with it. This one had slightly better results. I actually like the way this looks pretty well. For this sample, I did play with the tension a bit.
However when I tried it on an actual piece to be quilted (some placemats you’ll see in the next post), it left something to be desired. I found I had a real hard time moving the fabric around and definitely a difficult time moving it at a consistent speed so the stitches weren’t consistent and didn’t look pretty. Ultimately I ended up pulling it out and deciding to go with straight stitches, but I definitely need to revisit free motion quilting.
I’m taking another longarm certification course at a different location because the original location stopped offering rental 🙁 but I suspect once I have that available to me, I’ll prefer that over my home machine for speed and complexity potential.
