Free Motion Machine Quilting

Maple Leaf Quilters

February 26, 2001

Connie Jo Ozinga

875-4730

cjo@elmores.net

You can do this with any sewing machine. It works best if you can lower the feed dogs on your machine. Some older machines, including the Featherweight, have a metal plate that screws on over the feed dogs. Or you can cover the feed dogs with a piece of stencil plastic with a hole cut for the needle. In fact, as long as you can set your stitch length to zero you should be able to do this on your machine. There are special needles for machine quilting, but a regular machine needle is fine.

You need a spring type foot for your machine. These come under many different names, darning foot, big foot, spring foot, quilting foot, embroidery foot. This foot has a large opening and a hook of some type that hooks over the needle screw.

My favorite thread for machine quilting is Metrosene Silk Finish Cotton 50. I use this for both the quilting and the bobbin thread. It comes in many colors, and is available locally at Lollie’s and (I think) Yoder’s. I haven’t checked at Meredith’s. You can also get a few colors from the Nancy’s Notions catalog. For this class you can use any regular sewing thread. Please have your bobbins prewound. Pick a color that shows up against your fabric so you can see your stitches.

Plain muslin is fine, or any fabric you don’t mind using up. Cut 6 or 8 sandwiched sets of fabric-batting-fabric, at least 12 inches square, up to 18 or 20 is fine. Make one or two nine patch blocks in the same size range. Also look in your stash for a blobby print with lots of white background. (Like the watermelon sample at the January meeting.) Cut a square of this with batting and backing.

Basting

Bring a can of basting spray if you have one. Otherwise around two dozen safety pins will do.