Quilting 101: How to Free Motion Quilt

hey guys and welcome back to my channel we're continuing on with our quilting 101 series today with free motion quilting now this is probably one of the most highly requested ones that I've had lots of people want to know how to do it and I'm a big advocate for quilting your own quilt not only is it less expensive but I love the fact that I have made my quilts from beginning to end and that's not to UM put down any long arm cultures out there because they do absolutely beautiful and amazing work and if I were to be doing a wall hanging or something where I really wanted to showcase the quilting then I would probably go that route but for most of my quotes I give them away as gifts to family we keep some of them and so I just like to go ahead and put my own quilts it's actually also really fun I know it kind of sounds a little scary but it's probably one of my most favorite parts of quilting so for this we're going to be using our machine Gers gloves and I mentioned these in my first supplies video you're also going to want some practice batting and some scrap fabric you'll also be needing a free motion quilting foot now this is just this little kind of like guy with a spring on it and I'll do a close-up of him for you so you can see and then of course your sewing machine and your basted and ready to go quilt top so let's go ahead and talk about how I get started quilting my quilts okay I kind of zoomed out so you can see kind of a finished quilt so I can kind of describe to you the process by which I go through now since you if you watch my basting video you know that I prefer to spray baste a quilt that gives me a lot more flexibility on where I can start if you have pin basted your quilt most often you're going to want to start somewhere in the middle and then work your way out because the pin basting isn't quite as secure and it's really going to push that fabric and you want to be pushing all of your crinkles to the outsides of your quilt not pressing them in so that you end up with some kind of overlap in the center so if your pin basting start from the middle and go up now I kind of like to do my quilting quadrants so I would probably start if I were pin basting somewhere from here and then work out and up and sort of this way then I would come back and kind of do this one then that one and then finally this bottom one since I usually spray base that gives me a little more flexibility and so what I tend to do to make it a little bit less overwhelming is I go sort of block-by-block and since I'm spray basting again I don't have a lot of slippage so I usually start at an edge so I will start clear up there and potentially do all the way across that blue binding or blue border at the top and then maybe come down and do these right here across and then I'm going to focus on maybe this house this house this star and I'll kind of work my way down because it's a little bit less intimidating if you're working across your quilt and smaller sections that way you're not thinking like oh I have this ginormous quilt to get through and where do I even eat where do I even start so if you're looking at an area that's this big that's a lot easier and more manageable to kind of weave your way around then if you're thinking in the grand scheme of the entire quilt so my advice is to pick a square and just kind of do that little area then move over to your next square do that little area move over and continue going through your quilt until you've gotten all your squares done some of the other things to take into consideration if you're going to hand quilt on it I have actually done a mix of machine quilting plus hand quilting if the quilt has called for it and I'll like to leave maybe those sections blanks so it would be a possibility for me to maybe do a meandering in all of this white background and then maybe hand quilt inside these stars or something like that so you just want to kind of have a game plan before you just sit down and go for it just so you kind of know where you're going to start what pattern you're going to do and how you're going to kind of tackle it now my first advice is if you're a beginning culture and this is your first time I would suggest for sure starting on a practice piece and we're going to do that today so I'm going to show you some basic patterns that you can do that are really easy I do like to kind of do it just a little quick practice run before I start to check my tension make sure everything is kind of okay before I put my really good quilt on my machine the other thing is to keep in mind that smaller projects are going to be a lot easier to quilt than something that's huge like this now this quilt is a rather large quilt it me probably a good few hours to get through this now I didn't do anything super detailed I just did a little swirly meandering kind of thing all over the whole thing so it wasn't super involved and it did take me forever but wielding this large of a quilt through your machine especially depending on your machine can be kind of difficult this was probably one of the harder ones just due to size so if you're a new quilter my first suggestion would be to do something that's smaller find a smaller project or wall hanging or you know a pot holder or something like that the first one that I ever did I did as like a little mini dock boat for one of my daughters it was only um I don't know this by this or something and it was much easier I did straight line quilting on it for my first try and it's just a good idea to get used to the feel of your machine and how it all works and not have to be fighting with some kind of you know lots of bulk and all that kind of thing so if you're new I just suggest you start off with a smaller project if you're a little bit more advanced then throw this bad boy on your machine and go for it um but either way I think it's a really fun skill to have and so I hope you enjoy this video so let's go ahead and get started I'm going to show you some basic stitches and tips things to do to your machine to prepare yourself and all that kind of stuff so let's go ahead and get started all right so we're ready to get started the first thing that I do is I prepare my machine so I have my gloves handy this is not a necessity but I do have this so steady extension table if you have any kind of extension table or you're lucky enough to have a sewing table where your sewing machine sets down that's perfect it's not a necessity but it is really nice when you're trying to quilt you'd have like extra space to work with so if you don't have one of these I would say don't run out and buy one but just check it out make sure you like quilting first I did quilt several quotes on this machine before I got this it's just a really nice happen to have the next thing I'm going to do is make sure that I have the proper thread in now since my quilt is a Mac a mixture of colors mostly white background I'm going to go ahead and stick with my or fill this is 2021 it's 50 weight 100% cotton and it's just a nice wide it's kind of a little bit soft white so that's already in my machine up here and then the other thing that I need to do is put on my my free motion foot and these you're going to probably if it doesn't come with machine your machine you'll really need to get one of these in order to do free motion quilting it doesn't put quite as much pressure on your fabric and so it allows you to move your fabric around so I'm going to put that on in just a second and then the other thing that I always do before I start quilting is put in a fresh needle now I have found that if I'm having problems with breakage or tension issues or anything like that it's usually due to the fact that I just need a new needle so I try and make it a habit to put on a new needle on as soon as I start either free motion or straight line quilting either one I go ahead and swap out my needle I've already done that so I'm not going to do that now and then the last thing that I do is make sure that I drop my feed dogs and on my machine it's just this little lever right here drops my feed dogs down so they're not pulling my fabric through for me and then one other thing is my tension and you're going to have to experiment with this on your own machine because all the machines are gonna be a little bit different so I suggest taking a piece of batting and fabric and then just running it through a test run and just check your tension on both the front and the back to make sure I know that on my machine I usually have to increase my attention to about a six or seven four is my minimum or my average and so um so yeah I just usually start at six I'll run a couple strips of tests just to make sure I'm good and then adjust from there if I need to and then I can get started quilting so I think my machine is all ready to go I just need to swap out my foot and we can get started so quickly before we start I want to cover what size needle and thread I use now if I'm going to do free motion quilting on a machine then I stay with these eighty twelve needles this is what I use all the time even when I'm piecing if I am having breakage or issues and I've checked all my tension and cleaned my machine and all of that and I'm still having breakage then sometimes I will go up to a ninety fourteen this has a slightly larger eye and so sometimes it can help if you're having um your thread break I also don't change my thread in my machine this is just the aurifil 50 weight this one is twenty twenty four but I really prefer the 2021 I'm just out of it right now but it's the same thread weight so I don't change my thread at all and I normally don't change my needle unless I'm having issues if I'm going to be doing any hand quilting then I like to use this pearl cotton this is number 12 and the numbers can change based on thickness and I just kind of like this 12 weight one it's just kind of a nice hand stitch of course you have to use a larger embroidery needle to do that and I'll just use that if I really want my thread quilting to stick out and kind of be you know a focal point of the quilt but for free motion quilting on my machine I stay with the 50 Way or fill and the 8012 needle unless I'm having issues and I'll go up to the 90/14 needle alright one other thing that I do I always forget this part but I usually preload a few bobbins I only have a couple here I usually try and preload about maybe three or four kind of depends on how big the project is that way it's just easy for me to pop them in and out when I run out if I forget it's no big deal I'll just stop and take a break in between my quilting and and winder bobbin but I just wanted to mention that sometimes it's helpful with you to load a few before you get started alright now when you first sit down to free motion quote one of the first things you're going to want to do is obviously get out a piece of test fabric with some batting and just check your tension I'm going to see if I can recreate a couple of tension issues for you just to help you out on how to fix them so we're going to pull up our bottom thread and I'll talk more about this later on it's teeny tiny because I clipped my we're just going to get that out of there alright and just pull that aside that way it's not getting locked up in anything and then we're just going to take a couple stitches and I'm going to do just a straight line that's where I go the shorter my stages are now let's just take a look at those okay so now I'm not sure hopefully you can see this but my stitches are quite loose here up on top and as a matter of fact I can kind of pull some of them out and that means that my thread tension on my top thread is too loose it's just getting it's just getting pulled it's not and you'll have that on the back side as well where you'll see a line across here and I think it's kind of hard to tell but the line across the back is just a straight line of bobbin thread and my top thread isn't even hardly getting pulled through so that's the case you're going to want to increase your tension a little bit now my machine is all automatically set at a4 and so I would normally suggest that you just start wherever your standard setting is on your machine and then go up or down from there with your attention until you get something that's going to work so I went ahead and put mine back at a4 and let's see if that looks a little bit better okay now it is good to practice straight lines as well because I think you'll get better at you know just an even pace with your hand so hopefully you can see this let me see if I can do a close-up all right so hopeful you can kind of see this with this close-up at this first stitch at line I did where I had my tension top tension way down you can actually pull out these stitches now this one's back on my regular detention setting and you can't they're nice and tight and they're even kind of small because I was going really slow but that's what you want you want like a nice even stitch length you want to look just like it would be if you were piecing or anything like that you don't want any skip stitches or ripples or anything like that right now we're going to take a look at some speed issues and this is probably where you can have most of your problems once you get your tension resolved if you also are having tension issues like your bobbin is having problems I would honestly just pull it out and try and rethread your bobbin a lot of time you just don't have your bobbin in properly and that can cause issues as well alright so let's just see if I can show you what it looks like if you're going too slow versus too fast and as you can see when I took off here and I started going too fast these stitches are just like having a hard time staying in I mean I was just going way too fast so you don't want that now down here they're teeny tiny and you can't even like get them out if you have to pick your stitches for any reason you are not going to want to deal with this so the best thing to do is to try and come up with a nice even stitch length like I kind of did here on the center one kind of like what your machine would do if it were pulling them the fabric through on its own and straight lines are a good way to practice that as you can see I don't have a lot of Wobblies here I am actually still going slightly too slow I think I would probably speed up just a little bit but one thing that can happen and I want to show you I'll show you on my when we do the other sample as well but if you are going to be going around a curve of any type and you're going too fast all right I just want to kind of show you what happens on the back side if you're going around a curve too fast as you can see these little kind of eyelash just kind of stick out and really all that means is that you just were speeding so you need to slow down go around your curve a little bit slower your bobbin thread couldn't catch up with your top thread and so it ended up kind of pulling your top thread way too far in from the stitch length and so you end up with these crazy little hairs sticking out now that's not really going to do a whole lot other than change the look of it as you can see from the front and it actually doesn't look too bad you can kind of see down here on the bottom a little bit where it got pulled slightly but it's not like a huge deal you just want to note take a look when you're going around your curves and just make sure that you're checking your top and back of your fabric to make sure that you're kind of going at a nice consistent speed the other thing I will often do is clean out my machine beforehand and that means taking off my faceplate here taking getting all of the fuzzies out and all that kind of thing to make sure that my machine is nice and clean and ready to go and then I do load a few bobbins if I'm having troubles with bobbins I will take them out put them back in so top thread tension bobbins new needles are my tips for you as far as just troubleshooting if you're having you know issues with thread breaking and tension problems and things like that all right so let's go ahead and get started on our sample all right so we've got a machine all set up and I've put dark thread in just so that you can see it and I put some white just fabric on top of some batting so that I can have a practice piece and I would suggest you do this as well it's a great way to kind of get the feel of it it's a lot easier to practice on a smaller piece now as you get towards larger quilts it will be more difficult so I suggest you kind of start small if you're going to pin based your item then I would start quilting somewhere in the middle and then work your way out towards the edges so that you're pushing your fabric out if you've spray basted like I have you can kind of start wherever you want it doesn't really matter so I'm going to tell you a couple things to hopefully help you out my mantra while I am free motion quilting is fast foot slow hands and that means that with my pedal down here I am going to pedal to the metal all the way down as fast as it will go but my hands I'm going to and keep in a slower motion now the faster that you move your hands the larger your stitches will be the slow remove your hands the shorter your stitches will be and the goal here is to get an average stitch length so that it's kind of consistent all over just like if you were to be sewing normally so I'm going to just kind of get started here on the edge of my project and the first thing I'm going to do is drop my presser foot now since this is a free motion foot as you can see I still have a lot of flexibility I've also dropped my feed dogs so they are not going to be participating in this activity now the first thing that I want to do is drop my needle and pull up my bobbin thread and if you just kind of yank on it a little bit there you can hopefully see this bobbin thread coming up out of the bottom Sophal you can see right here I've got my bobbin thread pulling up and I just pull those out of the way and then the first thing I do is just take a couple of stitches to just kind of lock it in place now we're going to do just a simple pattern here of au shape so I'm going to just be going down and practicing you coming back up another you down and we're just going to do that all the way across this first piece just to kind of get the feel of our project so here we go all right so we're just going to kind of continue on with this process just trying to go the same speed fast foot slow hands and just get even stitches go the other way and I want you to Wow we're going to just try and fill up this whole square here with just these little swirls and you can start making them different sizes just try and be consistent with your speed all right now another thing that's good to practice on your practice piece is stopping and starting because you will have to stop and start throughout your quilt just to move things around and readjust your hands and I find it's easier to stop and start on a straight piece if you can if you're doing something where it's kind of always curvy it's a little bit more difficult but definitely practice that because one thing that can happen and I'll kind of show you let's say we're on kind of a curb here and we stop and start you if you don't remember kind of where you were going or whatever you can kind of end up with like that you know Jagr hopefully you can see this here on your curb so if you can at all possible stop and start on a straight area because it makes it a lot easier to just keep going however it is good to practice stopping and starting I'm continuing that curve on now hopefully you can see right here I stopped and then I just went ahead and continued and you can't even really tell because I've just done it you know several times so that's one thing to practice it is stopping and starting the other thing to practice is going to be something called a meander now once you kind of have this like up-and-down curve thing going and you you know you're kind of comfortable going both ways it's important to be able to go both ways we're going to practice going both up and down and side to side just so we can get used to it once you think you have a good feel for this and just do it as long as it takes you until you feel comfortable with it then you can kind of move on to the next pattern which is called a meander alright so on our practice piece we're going to try and kind of do the meandering and this quadrant over here and so we're just going to kind of the wave back and forth until we feel like we've covered it sufficiently you can just practice going in both directions and you can make them smaller or larger I think at first it's a little bit easier to make them a little bit smaller than it is to try and cover a large area I find that when you're going over a large area you tend to want to move your hands faster and then you start getting larger stitches and you start getting those eyelashes on the back and whatnot um the other thing at least for my machine and you're going to want to see if this is true for yours but when I stop my foot pedal my machine will still take one more stitch past that point and so if I am NOT holding my quilt down for that one extra stitch then I'll get a huge stitch and it could be in any direction that my coil has pulled it so my advice is to get your hands in position before you step on your foot pedal and then once you let off your foot pedal then and your needles come to a complete stop then remove your hands from that so let's go ahead and just start a simple meander pattern for your kite come back out in this spot came off over here I met my end and when you're doing a quilt you'll usually have some more batting over here so if that happens I'll just run all the way off my quilt top and then I'll just travel up my batting and then come back on somewhere else up here since I have kind of a small piece that's a little bit more difficult here so I'm going to just turn it a little bit and just kind of try and stay on my fabric all right now we're going to kind of keep going down this way the idea I'm gonna turn it back this way because it's a bit easier wait for my needle to take that extra and then I can move my hands away and we're all kind of on a curve I'm coming this way so I want to just continue on with that movement and we're good to go all right so now we've got this kind of just meander filled area and this is something that I would just practice again until you feel really comfortable with it this is why it's important when you're doing this one to kind of make sure that you can go both directions sideways up and down and that kind of thing that way when you get to doing something more like this you can go any direction you want and it doesn't really matter and if you do get yourself stuck in a bind where you know you're down here in an area where it's really tight just swoop out and just try not to cross my stitches at least that's what I do I just try and you know keep on going so worst case scenario if you run over your stitch or cross over I mean I don't think it's the end of the world some people will pick that out I'll usually just leave it and keep on going because yeah um now the next thing that I like to practice and I think would be good for you as well is called loop I call them loop Deleuze they're very easy to do and they're also another fun way to go about quilting project and these ones are really nice for just if you're filling in like a specific area or whatever they're really easy to kind of keep track of so we're going to do this quadrant down here now this square down here and we're going to do loop Delos and kind of what I'm going to do is come down do a loop come back do a loop come down do a loop and we're just going to do that all the way across until we get over here and then we'll just come down and just keep going so let's just see what that looks like now again I'm going to go ahead and pull up my thread since this is a sample piece you know I don't really have to do that but it's a good practice to get into and this is how also you're going to stop and start if you run out of bobbin in the middle of a project and will kind of do that as well okay so we're just going to start up here at the top all right we're just kind of doing loops here into a direction the slice I like to do this on Christmas you work on getting or you can come here like that where you've got like a point a noticeable point try and get your loops nice and and around and just practice on that Oh okay all right so these are just some another pattern for you that I think is fairly easy to start off with and I also really like this one because if you can get these nice and smooth so you're not having points on your loops it's a great way to quilt a project without worrying about you know trying to stay consistent in sizes or if you kind of get in going the wrong direction you can get yourself out of it really easily with the loops so that is one of my other favorite ones and then I'm going to show you one more today and this one is going to be just more of a consistent loop so we're just going to be doing kind of like figure eights all the way across all the way across to our pattern here so let's start here and we'll pull up our bob and thread again just kind of make it out it's going to be short when you have just cut your bobbin thread so I just kind of pull it just to get it out of the way we're going to do we're going to come down this way you can actually draw the line you can also make these water over a larger area it might be depended on the side smaller areas it's like we get to do on a smaller section if you have something where it's larger you can certainly make these you know like even taller if you want you can come clear down here and clear up here so it just kind of depends on what you need and I have normally with a design like this one I would normally kind of let my seam lines guide me so that I stayed a little bit more consistent in size but it's just another good pattern Oh okay okay so here's a look at our little swatch now as you can see we started out up here with just some really easy simple curves then as we got more brave we practice going the other way and then we started making them a little curvy or maybe and a little bit different in size just to create some more added visual interest and then we came over here to do a simple meandering shape and we just worked our way all around here and you can really go in whatever direction you want with this meander I will tell you it's a little bit easier to get stuck with a meander sometimes because you could work yourself down into like a corner say over here and this might piece might already be done so just keep an eye out when you're meandering you can kind of you don't want to go in rows because then it's really obvious that that's what you did like right here you can kind of see that I did a row they'll meander tends to look a lot better if you're kind of just weaving all over but just be mindful of where you are so you can kind of get yourself out of your area and then we did these kind of looky-loos right here where we just can go any direction and this is probably one of my more favorite designs it's really easy to get yourself out of a tough spot you can make these really small you can make some larger it's totally up to you I would practice both while you're practicing on your your sheet just to make sure it gives you a better feeling of what it's like to work in a smaller area versus a larger area it'll also give you a clue as to what you prefer visually which one you like to do more and same thing with all of these designs they can all be done on different scales you can do all of them on a larger or smaller scale and I would just practice both until you feel comfortable and then of course we did this kind of figure 8 type of deal and when I do this on my quotes I will usually use my seam lines this is obviously a little crazy here but I'll use my seam lines to guide me so that I'm not Criss crossing over my loops and also so that they're more consistent in length you can also use your friction pin and just write you know lines on there guidelines on there for you to follow and stay on and you can do that on your practice one as well I kind of quadrant AddThis off just to kind of keep myself in line for the video but you can certainly do it on your real quilt as well and just draw wise and then it'll help keep your area I found on real quotes I don't need to do this as much when I'm free motion quilting because like I said I just use the scenes and the blocks and whatnot to kind of keep myself in the right spacing so these are four different free motion quilting patterns that you can practice as a beginner I would just work on these in to feel comfortable and then try a smaller quilt project and then once you feel more comfortable with that go for a big quote now I am going to show you some video on how I do my larger quilts because it can be a little bit more intimidating when you've got a really big quilt and it's not as easy to move around as this little piece you're kind of having to pull and deal with weight and all of that kind of thing so we'll go ahead and cover that and then I also want to touch on my backside keep an eye on your backside I'm not sure if you can see this but I have a lot of little eyelashes and that's just because I was going too fast so for your purposes for the video I'm kind of like hurting trying to get things done for your purposes you're gonna want to take your time and just member remember the fast foot slow hands mantra just kind of keep chanting that over until you get used to going a relatively consistent speed alright I just want to show you this hopefully to encourage some of you out there this was probably one of the first quilts that I've ever quilted and I did my kind of loop-d-loop on and I got it even sure if you can see it I definitely messed up on a few of these some of them are pointy some of them are larger you know some of them are smaller I'm sure I ran into my stitches quite a bit on this one just because it was the first one I ever did on the backside you can barely kind of even notice it and so my point here and showing you this quilt is that this is probably one of my favorite quilts I've done partially because it was one of my first and I love the fabric and once you get done quilting it and you stick it in the wash and it gets all nice and crinkly like this you really can't notice all of those imperfections in your quilting so if you're one of those people who tends to be really hard on yourself and feel like it needs to just be absolutely perfect and you can't free motion quilt cuz you're afraid you're going to ruin your quilt I just want to encourage you to give it a try I mean you know once you get going on these designs the more you do the better you'll get and like I said once you wash it it gets all nice and crinkly and all of that it's really really hard to even notice if you've missed up you know messed up or you know if this loop is bigger than this loop or if they're too far apart or too close together and I'm sure I had all of those mistakes on this quilt as a whole and like I said you can't even really notice it once it gets washed and used and and people who are looking at these unless you're going to be you know entering this into some kind of a quilt competition you know you're going to be giving these to friends and family and and using them in yourselves to cuddle up with people are not going to sit there and look and say oh her stitch length varies from this one to this one or or any of those kinds of things so I really really want to encourage you to give free motion quilting a try now it sounds a little bit scary but it's actually super super fun and the more you do it the better you'll get at it and I think you'll really enjoy it it's one of my favorite processes of the quilting you know whole process and so I just want to encourage you to take it easy on yourselves give yourselves the allowance to make mistakes because you will I don't think I have quilted an absolutely perfect quilt yet this is all done you know by my hands in my machine and you know that makes it special for me hey I hope you enjoyed this video and as promised I have another fun giveaway for you so fat Porter shop is sponsoring a giveaway for this really cute tart thread set it's by aurifil thread it's 50 weight it's my favorite threat I use it on all of my projects for piecing quilting and everything and so if you'd like to enter to win out I'll put a link to my blog post below and you just want to hit over there and enter to win so I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you for the next one you

Channel: Erica Arndt

Views: 496,507

Rating: 4.8806062 out of 5

Keywords: Quilting, Sewing, Tutorial, Free Motion, How To

Id: ZCHLA1P43gw

Length: 36min 22sec (2182 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2016