August Friday Night Sew In Results

I’m going to start off by saying I am ridiculously pleased with myself.

Last night during FNSI, I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted to quilt the hot pads I had prepped and ready (see previous post.)

I had toyed with the idea of free motion quilting them.   For a while now I’ve been watching videos on youtube to learn how it’s done, but felt I hadn’t learned enough to give it a try.

First I tried sewing ¼” on either side of the blocks but didn’t like how that looked.  So I unpicked those lines of quilting.

Then I tried stitching in the ditch.  I liked how that looked especially when the stitches actually stayed in the ditch.  I don’t know if it was the extra layer of batting or what but I ended up having to unpick those lines of quilting too.

As I sat there at the machine trying to decide how I was going to go about quilting those hot pads, I thought to myself… what did I have to lose by just dropping those feed dogs, installing the darning foot and giving FMQ a whirl.   So that’s what I did.  And I had a blast doing it!

I meandered.  I made loops.  I made points (some intentional and some not so intentional.)

I overheated the foot controller of my 15-91.  Dave made some adjustments to the speed control screw and after a half hour break to let it cool down; I was back to meandering and loop-de-looping.

Now my FMQ certainly isn’t the prettiest.  And there are places where the stitches are bigger than others.  I’m still learning how to control how I move the quilt so that it moves smoothly so I don’t get those unintended points and wobbles.   But I’m definitely on my way to learning how to free motion quilt.

The Jacob’s Ladder hot pad was the first one I FMQed:

For the second hot pad, I only FMQed the background fabric.  That made the pinwheel really stand out and created a pretty “butterfly” on the back.

The third hot pad will be quilted today and then I’m going to get the binding on them so that I can start using them.

I’ll say it again, I am ridiculously pleased with how the quilting on these turned out for my first attempt at free motion quilting.

I would be so pleased if you chose to share by clicking on one of the buttons below!