A Lesson In Quilting

Close to completing my Serenity quilt top, I was at KIP. And I had just blogged about the fact that I thought I was going to send it out to let someone else machine quilt it. So one of the questions that came up a lot on that night was whether or not I was going to go that route. As it turned out Carolyn was at KIP that night and she spent a good deal of time trying to convince me that I should at least try machine quilting Serenity on my own. I protested about my lack of time, lack of equipment, etc. Carolyn gave me a number of good reasons in the opposite direction: machine quilting isn't that hard, doesn't take that long, you can trust the person doing the quilting, and the equipment isn't that hard to find, especially if you have access to a sewing machine. But then she hit me with the kicker: if you don't do it at least once yourself, you've never really actually done any quilting -- you've just sewn the top together. You should go through the whole process at least once. And then she volunteered to give me a lesson.

How could I refuse? Especially when Serenity was supposed to be for my own baby. And the good thing about babies? They are not so picky about how things look. The quilt will keep Miss Z warm no matter what I did to it.

So last Saturday I got to have my lesson with Carolyn. Carolyn has a very nice machine to use for quilting and is a great teacher. I learned about the kind of batting that's good to use; how to create the sandwhich of quilt top, batting and quilt bottom; why you can never have enough safety pins and how to deal with wrangling a large quilt on a small machine. And I also got to do some quilting using some muslin and cotton batting.

Straight Lines Using a Walking Foot

After getting my sandwich pinned together, I got an introduction to using a walking foot (a special foot for your sewing machine that essentially makes sure that the top piece of fabric moves through the machine at the same rate as the bottom piece of fabric). The first thing I did was stitch the horizontal and vertical lines. This helps to set everything in place so that you don't need the safety pins any more. After that, I put on the diagonal lines and the mild curves. Kind of fun, I have to say, and not hard. I also got to try out "stitching in the ditch" using a quilt block that Carolyn shared with me -- this is where you stitch into the indented area created by a seam. Also not hard. And likely to be what I do with Serenity.

Quilting with a Darning/Free Motion Foot

The next part of the lesson was even more fun than the first. Let me tell you, if you like to doodle or scribble, attatching your darning/free motion foot to your machine just lets you doodle with stitches. You can make wild curves, funky flowers, butterflies, strange squiggles. We quilted some straight lines first in order to stabilize the quilt sandwich, and after that anything could be done with the free open spaces. It takes a little practice to get the hang of balancing the speed of moving the fabric with the speed of the machine, but once you've got that, it's an opportunity to be really creative. I'm going to have to get some muslin of my own so that I can play with this on my own machine.

So now I have a basic understanding of quilting, and all I need to do to get Serenity taken care of is to buy a walking foot for my machine (who can complain about a good excuse for new toys?), find some Serenity friendly thread, a boat load of safety pins and some cotton batting.

Thanks again, Carolyn for a great afternoon and being an excellent teacher!