Beginner Free Motion Quilt tutorial on a home machine 2019

are you scared of giving free motion quilting a try don't be in this video I'm going to tell you everything you need to know to get started [Music] my name is Hugh and today's video is all about getting started with free motion quilting I did some free motion quilting on a few quilts when I just started out quilting and today's the day that I'm going to desktop my critique food because I just finished this quilt off and it screams for some free motion quilting if you stay until the end of the video I will give you my five top beginners tips for free motion quilting oh and by the way did you know that I made a free ebook with hundred and one quilting designs with straight line quilting so if you're still a bit hesitant after seeing this video go check out the link in the description box below this video before we start free motion quilting you first want to pop in your free motion quilting foot so I'm just going to unscrew my welcome thank girls this is what my free motion quilting foot looks like so you have an adjustable screw here which changes the height of your quilting foot with this you can set it to the correct height above your quilt sandwich going to show you that in a second but while I'm here I'm also going to dust out this a little bit you can also replace your needle before you start a new project always a good idea take out my bobbin if you often skip stitches while your free motion quilting you could try and go clean out your machine and put in a new needle because that could help to get better stitching putting back my bobbin so now I'm all set up to install my free motion quilting foot so this is different for every machine on the new machines you often have something like this where you can also adjust the height of your foot but on my very old machine but I have setup over here I have a very different kind of code this might be interesting if you also have a very old machine this is quite an odd kind of free motion quilting foot so this is it and you can move this so when you have installed it like this this thingy sits on top over here so whenever your foot goes down or your whenever your needle goes down you see it's released now and then when your food goes up again it will also bring up the foot so back to my Janome and as i said here is the screw and when I turn it you can see that my foot is going up I'm just going to put it quite high so then I can place my cool sandwich and the need and adjust it and here you see the feed dogs and what did you when you're sewing normally they're moving along your fabric so they are guiding your fabric when it's moving underneath your foot but you don't want this because with free motion quilting it goes in all directions so you have to lower your feed dogs and that's different for every machine I have a switch over here and then they are lowered so now they will still move a bit but they won't get above my stitching plate so that's that that makes my machine already for free motion quilting now I only have to get myself ready for free motion nothing and I do that by wearing these gloves these are gloves that I got with a quilting magazine and but I guess they are called quilting gloves or free motion quilting gloves they have all these kinds of little knobs on the surface so that makes sure that you have a lot of grip on your quilt which really really helps on quilting so if you're going to do free motion quilting do you get a pair of closing close one last thing I almost forgot to tell you you want to set your stitch length to zero that's automated by my machine so when I lower my feed dogs it's automatically set to zero but you do want to do that for your machine if you do have to do it by hand I am everything set up I have my machine ready I have my quilting gloves and now I made a test sandwich so I just used a piece of leftover betting and a piece of quilting cotton or other fabric that you have laying around and I've just made a tiny sandwich so that allows me to practice to be able to make mistakes to try out stuff and just to get to know your machine and your quilting food just compare it with a sheet of paper on which you can draw and doodle and that does not have to be perfect or pretty when you have your quilt sandwich under your quilting foot you can adjust the height to make sure that it and the food just hovers over the quilting fabric and that it doesn't push down too much as you can see here I'm pushing into my sandwich and that way it's not able to move any more so when it just plays a little bit higher I'm able to move around my fabric I've put in a white thread so it's contrasting with my blue fabric and I'm just going to lower my needle and bring it up again and then I'm going to pull on my thread and as you can see my bobbin thread is coming up and I'm going to grab it and pull it through there we go just bringing both threads underneath my closing foot and then I'm going back to the place where my bobbin thread came up so these two threads I'm just going to leave them here at the end when I'm gone quilting I will make it tiny not very close to my fabric and then use a needle to bury it in between the two layers of my quilt but for now I'm just going to leave them here maybe trim this off a little bit there we go so now we're going to make our first free motion stitches are you excited let me get my quilting gloves first just go and make some stitches put in your food and just see what happens so my needle starts moving okay that's good because you can move your needle in the same spot no problem you can move a little bit see how it goes what happens you can move very fast or you can move your needle very fast let me turn my work so you can see what just happened here so here you see where I just started and then I moved my fabric vary for us so the stitches become very big and then I move my needle very fast so then the stitches become smaller so uhm it's finding the balance between those two I'm going to lower my food just a little bit that's better so it's finding a balance between the two you move your food and find a study space where you like the size of your stitches so there's two things you move with your hands and you push your food down so that needs to be in balance to get the stitches that you want and this is just practicing so just go and make some lines and see what happens if you move your fabric fast yes it's just become very big and then go back and move your fabric a bit slower then my stitches are a little bit too small for my taste so I think I want something kind of in between here so here you see all kinds of stitches so just might make some random movements and see how it feels see how you want to move how fast you want to move your hands and then adjust the height of your food so the speed of your needle with that so once you get the hang of it a little bit and you find the right combination for your food and your hands when you feel like you're getting more comfortable just go and try some things go try and maybe make some straightest lines let's see how that feels and then maybe try to see if you can make some wavy lines and always just stop stop when you want to don't feel hurried because your machine can go so fast just stop when you want to you can go as slow as your machine can go so when I just want to go very slow I will just move my fabric slower see these same kind of stitches but here I went faster than I did here so I just adjusted my needle speed and my hand and the speed of my hands some other thing you might want to try is for example making a zig zag go one direction straight go one other direction straight just some fun things to try and see if you can get to know your machine if you come to a spot in your quilt where you want to follow a line that's totally fine it's called travel stitching so then you can just go and try to stitch on the line that just stitch before so now I travel along this line from here to there and when you zoom in very closely of course you will see this but imagine you're having a very big quilt and you have some tiny pieces while you travel stitch you will not really see that when you're done have fun go filling your whole practice piece and then maybe another and maybe another until you have the feeling that you can make straight lines straight each lines that you can make wavy lines and then you can start trying to do some other things like meandering as I'm doing here so you're making random movements you can see my stitch length is still not consistent I'm honestly also still practicing and not really a pro in free motion quilting but I enjoy it so much it's so much fun whoops I cut it out there so just go and practice and have fun really Instagram when I asked for questions about free motion closing how you can make these smooth lines that's really bad practicing just finding the speed that's comfortable for you to move your hands and the speed of your needle when I was making this improv era quilt I immediately know that I wanted to use this for improv quilting and because uh because I haven't done improv coding for awhile I thought this would be perfect to use as a practice group so I just practiced on a little test sandwich but I'm going to use this quilt actually to practice all different kinds of free motion quilting and patterns so let me put this under my machine I thought I would make a pretty small improv quilt so that it was easy to handle out of my machine but it got quite big but that will allow me to show you how I handle a bigger quilt under the machine because it's a little bit more complicated to quilt um a bigger quill than just on your test sample so what I'm doing is that I'm rolling up my quilt under the arm of my machine and then I have a pretty big arm on this Janome sewing machine but it's perfectly fine if you have a smaller one just roll up your quilt so that's easy to manage that way you can actually grab that part of the quilt and move your field around and around like that or you can move it around like this and when you have your quilting gloves on but rolling it up it makes it easy to manage and the next thing I did was make sure well almost that my table is empty so that I have a lot of space to move and I'm just going to put the curled on top of me so that it's not tucking on the table you don't want your cool pulling anywhere because that will make it more difficult to move it around so let me move my camera and show you what I'm going to do so this is one of the improv blocks that I made and what I did was I created some straight lines around it and not really following this shape but just making it a bit bigger and also the dad for this one so I'm going to make rectangles around all the blocks and then when there's an area in between I'm just going to fill it with something else but this makes it easy for me to quilt in patches so this is the area that I'm going to quill right now and I'm going to quilt all around the arrow so I'm not going to quilt the arrow itself and hopefully that will make the arrow pop because there's texture around it and not inside there we go [Music] [Music] and there is my whole area filled in and while I was quilting this area I didn't have the feeling that I had total control my crew was tagging a little bit on the front of my on my lap and I had to reposition my hands very often and I didn't have the feeling that everything was very consistent or very even but now when I look at it when that this piece is done it looks okay it's a it's perfectly fine so I'm happy that I'm working on this quilt as a practice quilt that really takes the anxiety out of the quilting so this quilt was made to practice free motion quilting on so I shoot practice free motion quilting on it and don't wait until everything is perfect let's fill in another area with a different pattern [Music] [Music] so this is what I had in mind what I was going for like some loop tea design with triangles so the left part of the design is way more Messier and really not as pretty as I had in mind but that's okay I'm just picking up a free motion quilting again so it's just to practice and this learned me something that maybe I had too much fabric on the top of my machine laying around because I felt that my quilt really was pulling and I didn't take a break I didn't rearrange my quilt I just went on because I thought I can do this I can do this and even though that's a good thought but for this particular piece I think I should just have to stop and rearrange my quilt or maybe even turn it so that I would indeed add in another direction to make it easier for myself [Music] as promised I'm going to give you my top five beginner tips for free motion quilting take a simple pattern just go with some wavy lines some straight ish lines some simple meandering or look T loop whatever you feel like but just follow what goes easily and just try to get to know your machine and the speed of your hands first go slow really you don't need to speed it up just go slow and see what feels right take breaks because you know especially when you're working on a bigger quill it can really be straining in your Schuler's and you can be working like this at least I am often so taking breaks relax your shoulders drink a cup of tea that really helps your quilting doodle first when you're first starting and have never filled a space with some doodling or drawing just try it out first with a pencil on a piece of paper you can take a quilting design and go start drawing it and see if you can fill the whole space with a pond design it will give you some feeling of how it's going to look so and that's a good practice before you start on a really cool last one give it time don't compare yourself with others you won't paint them lissa the first time you pick up a paintbrush and the same it is with quilting quilting is an art and you can develop your own style you will get better when you practice just practice practice practice and while you're practicing and judge a journey you will get better with every stitch want to see more videos like this make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel it's completely free and it lets YouTube know that you like these kind of videos so that more and more of my videos can be shown to quilters all around the world don't forget to hit the bell sign them so you get a notification when my next video will be online thank you so much for watching I asked them Instagram if you had any questions about free motion quilting and I try to answer them all in this video but if you have more questions please put them in the comments below so I can answer them in a quilting Q&A have fun with your free motion quilting project and I hope to see you next week bye bye

Channel: Sugaridoo

Views: 231,004

Rating: 4.9386902 out of 5

Keywords: how to do free motion quilting on a regular sewing machine, free motion quilting on home machine, free motion quilting tutorials for beginners, free motion quilting beginner tutorial 1, quilting on a janome machine, quilting on a regular sewing machine, beginner free motion quilting tutorials, free motion quilting, how to quilt for beginners, how to quilt with a sewing machine for beginners, free motion quilting machine

Id: _8np3fnQSGI

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019