Quilty: How to Stitch in the Ditch

[Music] quilty you we'll see is brought to you by a pqs and crafted quilting machines are a film our affiliate aliens read perfectly suited for all your quilting projects baby lock for the love of selling hovels sewing when you need to cut it close choose hobbles Moda make something quilting with Moda fabrics hey everybody my name is Mary Fonz and you are watching quilty we're glad that you're here this week and every week and this episode today is going to be focused on quilting we're gonna do more shows on quilting the quilt because we we focus so much on patchwork on the show because patchwork comes first and we really love doing patchwork but you know cool things a pretty important part of making a quilt and so we're going to talk today about stitching in the ditch what is it and how do you do it and we're also going to talk about changing the foot on your machine to that walking foot which is a really wonderful invention so if you take a look here I have prepared this little quilt sandwich okay this is a quilt block little sawtooth star and we have some batting underneath and then we have some backing fabric and that is the quilt sandwich that we all know and love okay so I have basted this for machine quilting when we baste for machine quilting which basting means to hold something together loosely temporarily we baste with safety pins when we're going to machine quilt so we've got our safety pins in here I don't need many it's is a pretty small little sandwich and the ditch I want to point out what the ditches this is the ditch the ditch it refers to the seam basically between one piece of patchwork and another so this would be the ditch this would be the ditch it's that it's that like crevice that crevice where two pieces of fabric meet okay and and one way that you can quilt your quilt once you have your top done and your batting's there and your backing is there and you've baste it all together you can stitch in the ditch and you just basically you're following the lines of your patchwork with your quilting and that's that's all you do you're not doing any fancy flowers you're not sewing straight lines all over in some diamonds or circles you're stitching in the ditch you're just following the patchwork lines okay so we're going to do that right now so let's go over to the machine and I'm going to change the foot out and show you how that works so you understand all right so this is a walking foot and it is a really heavy little piece of piece of equipment here but it is a beautiful thing when you're a machine quilting we're going to put it on the machine right now this is a very large screwdriver I use a screwdriver for my tool kit rather than the screwdriver that comes with the machine we love baby lock we love all our tools and we know that maybe it's just that screwdriver is smarter than I am I don't know but I always feel like I need a little bit bigger of a tool to get this thing on so take that as you will and you use what works for you so what we do and the first thing is to turn off your machine because you don't want it you know starting to you don't hit the pedal and hurt yourself you release your presser foot okay take off that little presser foot if you've got one on set it to the side and then you get your handy-dandy screwdriver alright so this screw here this is why I like this big screwdriver oh yeah see you just like start unscrewing that guy and that mechanism comes off I know that mechanism has a name but it's not that important what it is maybe we'll find out and we take our screw off completely please don't lose that screw that would be bad and we bring our walking foot over and this little lobster claw fits up on that bar and your manual will always tell you you know how to place it on and how to do this and it fits right against that bar it's got sort of two points of contact there and then you replace your screw okay so you kind of get it started with your hands and then your mister screwdriver comes back in and you tighten it you tighten it pretty tight I mean just like any screw you would ever screw into anything including like wood or you know I don't know metal whatever you know you don't want to strip the screw so don't be you know screwing it so hard in there that it feels like you're forcing it but you definitely want it to be snug okay so you make it snug it's on there beautiful you can turn your machine back on account and set your needle to the proper position depends on what machine you've got and you're ready to stitch in the ditch okay so let's let's do a little bit of it and do this so I'm going to put my quilt sandwich into my machine and you're going to sew in the the shallow side of the ditch okay I'm going to drop my presser foot I'm going to start a little bit off of my patchwork and here we go and I'm just stitching right in that crease basically now one thing you want to remember is that what you're doing on the top is going to show up on the bottom so if you're not that confident with your quilting pick a thread that's like really neutral that sew on the back it doesn't show that much and what I would do is lower my needle raise my presser foot turn it drop that presser foot keep going and you just continually keep stitching and and you could really do a lot of this without ever changing your input up without ever cutting your thread okay so I've got one that's all finished and we're going to bring it out here it's not too bad I would recommend a couple things before we go save these little parts don't lose those please don't lose them put a little envelope near your sewing Center keep all that stuff together put it in a box your machine comes with a little box to hold all those feet really really important you don't lose those parts because they can be expensive to replace so anytime you're messing with your presser feet keep them in the same place and also stitching the ditch is really easy to follow it's good for maybe your first quilt but you should also know that it's fairly time-consuming to go around each one of the things that you do you might actually find as some beginner quilters do machine quilters that you would rather do like straight lines just straight up grid something like that it may go a little bit faster it might be harder for you to keep those lines straight but that actually might go faster for you then stitch in the ditch this is just a way to do machine quilting that looks pretty darn nice because you're just following the lines okay so that is stitching in the ditch a lesson on it anyway there's a lot more we could say about it and we will on future episodes of quilty so thanks for watching and check out the magazine it's so good it's so good and so are you okay see ya fight quilty is brought to you by a pqs and crafted quilting machines are a film are a fill Italian thread perfectly suited for all your quilting projects baby lock for the love of selling hovels sewing when you need to cut it close choose hobbles Mota make something quilting with Mota fabrics [Music] quilty [Music]

Channel: Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting

Views: 205,237

Rating: 4.6429214 out of 5

Keywords: Quilting Termology, Stitch in the Ditch, Quilty, Mary Fons, Quilty DVD, QNNtv.com, Quilting Term, sewing walking foot, sewing machine, Free Quilting Video, Free quilt lesson, Free quilt tutorial, Sewing (Hobby), www.shopquilty.com, www.heyquilty.com, www.QNNtv.com/quilty, easy quilting techniques, fun quilting tips, free easy quilting video

Id: -LgYBUpRYeU

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2013