Sit down Free Motion Quilting Tips to get started

hello there I'm Lauren with bold machine quilting and welcome to free motion Monday so normally I'm doing these free motion Monday tips on my long arm machine but I've got a nice big quilt on there right now so I can't take it off to do any of our free motion tips so today I thought it would be fun to do some free motion Monday tips on sewing at home on your domestic machines I'm a free motion quilting instructor and I teach at my local quilt shops as well as on my web page bold notion quilting calm and I've got a couple different classes on there available for you to watch if you're interested in learning some more about free motion quilting and I was recently on a hiatus from teaching because it was winter break and my kids were out of school and I can't film or do anything when my kids are home so going back kind of with a fresh set of eyes not having taught for a couple months I realized that when I was in class the ladies were asking me all the same questions that they asked in all in like all of my classes so I thought that by putting this video out there if we share it to our quilting groups and our Facebook pages that maybe we could meet reach more ladies and they can start their quilting journey ahead of the curve already knowing these things so the first thing ladies ask me is what foot do I use okay so this is a quilting foot okay it's a it's a spring-loaded quilting foot you can get them without the spring on them depending on the kind of machine that you have and if you notice it's got an open toe and it just has enough space for you to see you cannot quilt on a regular foot because you just don't have the area the visual area to see and it's also harder to kind of visualize your designs but if you have a foot like this and you can even get some generic ones even plastic ones that you can see better through for pretty cheap this is a ruler foot and you can use this to free motion quilt as well so you can kill two birds with one stone and only get one foot to use for both things the next thing ladies ask me is how do I put my foot on so I've got this little and all machines are different I'm using a Viking fire 8:35 okay but mine has a flat side on it which most of the machines do some different machines I believe maybe Bernina and fight have the same mechanism to hold the feet on you have to buy their particular ones but for my Viking you can buy a generic spring action quilting foot and put it on there so in order to change out your foot you gotta get your screwdriver turn your screw to take off your ankle okay your ankle attaches to your foot I like to keep mine together before I put them away so I don't lose one or the other don't lose sight of your screw go ahead and get that other foot on so it's got this little hole right in here I got a slide that around this shaft not all of them are like that some of them will probably just slide right on flat but this one has to get slid on and then if you'll notice there's a little bar right here for the spring action and then there's a little bar right here that is holding your needle in that little that big screw that's holding your needle in is where this bar is gonna rest on top and what's going to happen when you sew is as it goes up and down it pulls that spring up yeah I've got it gently in there I'm gonna turn that screw nice and tight so that it's good to go so now my spring action foot is loaded it's the same thing if you were using the ruler foot because that just has the little slot on the side and you unscrew the screw slide it on and screw the screw in so that you can then begin using this so now that you've got your foot on you want to get ready for the process of quilting so you can see here I've got a large quilting base okay that's something that I would recommend if your quilting if your machine can sit down into a table that would be helpful as well and I know a lot of ladies are like it's hard to move the fabric what do I do you can actually get something called silicone spray okay and you dry spray so it's okay to spray around your machine it's flammable and you can't swallow it so do it in a well-ventilated area and you're just gonna spray it along the base of your quilting surface it's gonna get on my cord for my microphone here but that's okay then you want to take just like your wax in your car you want to take a spare piece of fabric and you want to buff that in then what the silicone spray does is it makes your table smooth like you're skating on ice and I kind of just rub it in everywhere you notice I didn't spray a lot around my machine where my feed dogs are just because I like to err err on the side of caution I know it's a dry spray and it's safe but you get enough excess of the other stuff that you spray on your table that you can kind of just wipe it all around there and not have to worry about that so that's nice and smooth I can already feel less friction now the next thing that ladies ask me when we do silicone spray is is that on there forever do I have to reapply it it does come off over time it's not anything that's going to stain your quilts but you will have to reapply it from time to time on your surface to make sure that it stays super slick you can also if your long arm quilter spray this onto your ruler base to minimize the drag that you have from your ruler base all right so before we can free motion quilting we need to set up our machine for free motion we've already put on our foot our needle goes in there nice but we need to go ahead and thread our machine I have trouble threading my machine with the top to my glove so I'm gonna pull those off real quick okay I'm gonna go through and I'm going to thread my machine so I've got my spool of thread on there okay now the rule generally is if your thread has straight lines like this if it's been on there with straight lines you can put it horizontal if not you can put it on there vertical these are diagonal lines so I should put this on vertically but because I'm so far into my spool it sometimes can be a pain in the butt for it to come off my thread spool or if you're using those cones that don't have a top those need to be vertical as well which I don't have one readily to show you so I'm go up gonna go ahead and thread my machine and this is something that I didn't know so I really want to share it with y'all because I felt really dumb I didn't realize it until I was working at a quilt shop but once I came around my top hook and I'm coming back down and I'm getting ready to put my thread in my needle there is this little hook right here that my thread is holding on to and your thread has to go through that hook for the best possible tension outcome if it's not in there you get this big wad of nested fabric on the back and then I'm going to go ahead and use my threader I don't know why it's being a pain today probably because I'm trying to film my thread tail was way too long is the problem - all right so we got our thread through there and then our bobbin is all set up and threaded and ready to go and if you notice I left a nice long bobbin tail because I don't have one of those fancy machines so I'm going to show you guys how to tack on your threads real quick but before I continue I want to show you one more thing so for varying spools of thread it does matter how you put the thread on I don't know if you can see this well but this spool a lot of small goo Terman type spools they have these bumpy ridges and you can actually put your thread on backwards and it'll catch on those ridges as it goes on so you want to make sure to put the side with the smooth side onto your spool holder when you're getting your thread on there so now that you've checked your thread you've put on your hopping foot you've checked for lint you're pretty much ready to go for quilting you've got your ruler you're not ruler based but you've got a bigger base set up for your quilting if you don't have the big acrylic base to set up like this one that's totally fine you can use what you have for your machine the so Sethi table that you can get just can make it a hundred times easier to quilt and then of course if you have a table you can set your machine and that's wonderful too the next thing is you want to consider how big the quilt is that you're quilting because a big part of quilting that can be really hard on the body is having to move and shift and drag the quilt around so I want to give you some tips for that so there are plenty of ladies who will go to a hardware store they'll buy clamps either like this or the plastic ones the plastic ones I think have holes right here in the handle you can tie a bungee to it screw the bungee into your ceiling and you can clip it on various parts of your quilt top and it can hold up the edges to eliminate the drag okay if you don't want to get up there and screw holes in your ceiling and fix bungees to them you can also go to Target or Walmart and get a rolling like clothing rack assemble that you can roll it up to where you're quilting and have the bungees hold it on either side of your table they can hold up your fabric and then it's kind of portable and can move with you however you decide to move your sewing room around in the future if neither of those are an option for you the other thing that you can do that is really great is with your quilt when you're getting ready to quilt it pull areas up onto the top make sure nothing is tucked under where your quilting but just eliminate the drag by creating a lot of slack then you kind of quilt with big piles of the fabric around you and that's gonna eliminate a lot of the drag which is going to be easier on your body and give you smoother quilting designs alright so I have my quilting sample ready to go and this is just scraps of fabric so when you're practicing what I recommend is getting something plain like you see here to practice on so that you can really see the designs that you're working with and then I'm going to be using white thread so select a contrasting thread so you can really see how well you're working your way around the designs okay your hands can get really dry so to make it easier to maneuver the fabric around if you get some quilting gloves that can really help you these are just grab a roof there's all kinds that you can get it's nice to have the silicone on both sides of the fingertips almost all of them are like that that way when one side wears down you can switch hands and use the other side and you get twice the life out of your gloves when you first start quilting even if you're using scraps I recommend not using the puffier batting's practice quilting using just a natural batting so this is just a select loft so it's not super lofty but it's just a regular cotton cultures dream batting that I use to practice with because it's easier to learn and get down the momentum without having the fluff and puff of maybe a poly puff batting or a wall or anything like that in your way so when you're trying to get down the motion of the designs use a flatter batting now to tack down your threads what you're going to need to do is go ahead and get your fabric on there you got a nice long bobbin tail and you've got nice long thread started for your top thread okay I'm going to go ahead and put my quilting gloves back on to maximize my grip while I'm quilting which will give me more control over my designs and then if you haven't already so you've went ahead and you've threaded your top you threaded your bottom you actually need to take your feed dogs down so for me my feed dogs are right here and I can switch this back and forth it's got something that looks like little triangles and one that looks flat and for that see if I can get this closer that it's hard to see because it's white but I got a straight line here and I've got triangles here so those are my teeth saying my feed dogs are up when I push it that way my feed dogs go up when I push it the other way my feed dogs go down and they were just set to down so they're just kind of staying staying down and with the flow they're okay the last thing you need to do is if you have a machine that you have to put into free motion mode okay you're gonna come over to your control panel you're going to go to your settings and you're gonna scroll down until you see something that says free motion floating sometimes it doesn't say anything what it does is it has a symbol that looks just like this quilting foot it's just a little seen it's got a curlicue next to it that is your free motion setting okay so I'm going to go in and I can choose from free motion floating or free motion spring action and we know that I put on a spring action foot but I'm gonna select floating mode hit okay and then hit my settings to go back so now my machine knows that we're getting ready to free motion quilt in in floating mode the reason why I do it in floating mode is because when I tell it to do spring action I get these long and short stitches because it's trying to anticipate what I'm doing okay so let's do some testing with a thread I've got my machine and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my speed all the way down to begin okay and I'm gonna try to quilt and I'm just gonna see how naturally my body wants to quote so let's tack off our threads needle down once up slide your fabric pull up that bobbin thread from the bottom and what we're doing is basically making sure that we don't have to turn our quilt over and check for any threads wilmore done quilting we are done quilting okay we don't have to go back and tack that stuff okay so I've got a couple stitches in there the more you do this the better you get at it when I first started cooked tacking down my threads I would have huge knots on the back of my clothes but now it's as seamless as getting a straight line in there to start quilting all right so I'm on the slowest mode and I know I'm a fast quilter so I'm only doing this to really showcase how this works for you guys okay let's see I want to make sure I'm as close as possible I'm gonna go ahead and tack down my threads I put my needle in once I move my fabric ever so slightly to create a knot I get three to five stitches in there and it creates a nice little knot for me and there's no threads or anything on the back that I could potentially quilt into my design or that I'm gonna have to turn my quilt over and snip so my machine is on the slowest possible speed setting when you first start quilting you have no idea how fast anything needs to stitch how fast your hands need to go how far down your foot needs to go to keep your machine going and what speed your machine should go on on top of all of that you also have to pay attention to the length of your stitches and how well those are forming and doing the configuration of your design so let's see how we can kind of better help the learning curve so I like to start tell people to start at the slowest possible setting for their machine go ahead and quote let's go find the pool saying those stitches are pretty long okay so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna up my speed okay there's two ways that I can do this one I can move my hands slower and stitch slower with this to make smaller stitches this is at maximum speed but do I want to quote this slow to get my stitches in there no the other thing I could do is tell my machine to go faster by upping the speed now let's say your speed is all the way up and you're still going too fast with your hands there's still one more thing you can do to speed your machine up a little bit more we can take our stitch length down as far as it can go and assuming your machine is fine with that your threads don't break anything like that you can pedal to the metal and go okay aside from that let's say you're stitching and your stitches are just okay first of all you're never going to be able to rip those suckers out so I hope you don't need to Unseld anything but if your stitches are too tiny what you could then do is slow your Machine down and there's two ways to do that okay you can take the speed down if your machine doesn't have a speed regulating button on there for how fast it can go then what you can do is up your stitches now when I say up your stitches you can let's take it over here my stitch length is at 1.5 right now I can make my stitches bigger okay so it's going to be at 3.5 I got a good stitch length to go in there so and I'm naturally a fast quilter so for me the faster the better but that's how you can kind of adjust and try to figure out the right stitch length now if you can set your machine to a fixed speed okay so this is my speed control setting right here if I need to go slower I can take it down just real slow or I can make it go faster what I can do is have my machine on a particular speed put my foot to the floor on my pedal so I'm going to do pedal to the metal and that's going to keep my machine going at one constant speed so I'm gonna put my foot to the floor have my machine on medium speed and that way I know my machine is going at one constant speed so then all I have to think about is not how much to push down or pull up my foot on the pedal while I'm sewing I just have to worry about how fast to move my hands so you know that comes in paying attention to the stitch length and making sure that stitch length is one that you want to see once you get a good rhythm going and a good muscle memory and you get a good feel for how fast your body can move then you're not really paying attention to how fast your hands have to move you're just focusing on trying to make pretty designs and practice getting those down so playing with those settings on your machine at the beginning to figure out what's good for you can help you tenfold so once you figure out your settings and this is the kicker write them down somewhere that you won't forget them that will make a big difference so that way you don't have to do the process all over again you can just pull out your notebook and take a look if you're going too fast or too slow on your machine I often see quilters get panicked or frustrated they speed up their needle because their hands are going too fast but then they hear their machine going to faster than they speed up their hands and it's one of those games that you play with yourself that you're constantly trying to keep up and slow down with your machine because you can hear it so if hearing your machine on any kind of machine that you're working with makes you feel like you need to go faster sometimes it helps to listen to some music while you're stitching and kind of just find a good flow so you're only focusing on the link those stitches and you're kind of illuminating all the extra noise around you the next thing is I see ladies over correcting so get over here somewhere and I got a speed up my machine because I just quilt faster than that so if we're doing feathers let's say we're doing a feather people will do the feather and they don't give themselves time to stop and think right so then weird things happen okay cuz you hear the Machine you feel like you have to keep going instead maybe what you do is you give the feather stop think are going to go up touch stop and think whoa sorry come back stop because you know you're going to do another bump out feather bring it around now I'm not saying you're gonna do it this way for the rest of your life but when you start quilting it really pays to give yourself a moment to stop and think the best way you can do that is when you stop with your machine make sure that your needle is in the down position so that it always stops exactly where you are and you can keep going right away you don't have to worry about if you move the fabric or anything in the meantime so lastly one of the best tips that I can give my students when they come in for class it's just that you need to practice okay when you don't have a designated quilting area practicing can be pretty difficult so it's best if you set yourself up for success and what that means is that you're going to buy a panel and panels are great because they only cost a couple bucks you could probably find some on clearance that don't cost too much and you can make yourself a quilt sandwich and then each day and the reason why panels are great is because they have different sections each day you can plan to quilt just a little different part of that section work on the feathers inside this oval or the pebbles or the feathers around her and you can give yourself little sections to accomplish that are going to take you ten to 15 minutes to work out and you'd be surprised how different your quilting will look even if you do the same design every day and just practice it you know a different size and each element you'd be surprised how different your quilting looks from Sunday when you started to Saturday when you finish ten to fifteen minutes a day is great and having a panel already quilt sandwich together and just laying next to your machine sets you up for success because it's as easy as turning your machine on putting the panel under it and starting to quote alright so now that I've shown you all the differ tips that I have for someone who is quilting on a domestic machine I just want to recap one silicone spray and gloves can be your best friend silicone spray kind of eliminates some of the friction that happens when you're quilting and the gloves can really help you to maintain a good grip on your quit without having to put too much pressure and strain on your body and then you've also got your quilting table which is going to be a huge help to you you want to minimize the drag for your quilt top as well and remember to do that you can use the clamps all around your quilt top hanging from the ceiling if you've got a great designated space for your sewing if you don't you can go to Target or Walmart and get one of those rolling garment racks tie the bungees to those and hang your clips from that so like I always say if it makes it easier if it makes quilting more enjoyable definitely do it don't let your machine tell you what to do it's not in charge so if it's having any kind of trouble give it a good look through check make sure your thread is threaded properly in your top as well as in your bobbin check for any lint that's the biggest thing that can really gum up and muddy your machine when you're quilting as well as making sure that when you're quilting if you hear that needle going fast just gotta ignore it and go with the flow and try to find a good stitch length that works for you that you like I don't think that there's necessarily a right or wrong for if your stitches are too long or too small aside from the difficulty with picking them out if they're too small or if they're too big they could catch on a number of things and pull and break so you just got to find a good thread width that works for you a good stitch length so this is a free youtube video definitely visit me on my youtube channel and subscribe if you want to get the new videos as they come out we'll be doing a lot of new videos this coming year as well as all of the links are going to be in the description of this video so if you want to see what I'm up to on Facebook and then there's also Instagram at bold motion quilting my youtube channel is called bold motion quilting as well all the links are in the description and then of course we just launched our bold motion quilting calm web page which I'm super excited about there's classes on there you can check back monthly for new class says that'll be coming out I got a lot of things in the works for getting the classes out so we've got a tutorials page from different tutorials for free motion designs and how to get your rulers to work better for you as well as there's a gallery on there and a shop so I just started selling different kinds of notions I carry glide thread right now there's a plethora of types of glide thread on there I think we get so used to quilting with our one kind of thread we get kind of terrified to use anything else and I'm here to urge you to be bold and to try something new so I've ordered all different kinds of glide thread there's cotton there's poly there's poly spun which is a matte poly and it looks like a cotton there's a poly core wrapped cotton which is a stronger version of cotton etc there are so many different kinds on there you can go and take it to take a look and see which ones that you might like to try out and then as well as rulers batting and then different kinds of Riley Blake fabric so go out go onto bold motion quilting calm and give it a look we do have classes like this this is our simply gorgeous free motion quilt along she is one of a series of two panels and what we do is I walk you through all the different elements of doing a quilt from start to finish so you're going to learn about the free motion designs I'm going to walk you through how to mark the quilt to get the designs in the place that they should be how to work your way around the free motion aspects and how to place them and why I place them where I place them and then you'll watch me stitch them as well so you participate in this free motion quilt along from start to finish you don't have to buy the panel if you want to take the class and just learn the different techniques and participate you can still get a ton of information that way but there are three panels left on my on my web page simply send me contact me on bold motion quilting comm send me an email and I will give you a link for where you can pick up some more panels so thank you so much for joining me today I hope that this information was helpful and it will aid you in your quilting going forward if you like the information you found it helpful please give it a thumbs up and share it on Facebook your different pages and quilting groups spread the word help people learn how to shorten the learning curve for quilting let's take some of that learning curve out of there so that people can feel more comfortable more confident and happier when they're quilting I share that information and get it out there make it easier for others so thank you so much have a great day and happy quilting

Channel: Bold Notion Quilting

Views: 537,187

Rating: 4.8407369 out of 5

Keywords: BoldNotionQuilting, freemotion, freemotionquilting, fmq, quilting, howto, doityourself, sewing, freehand, doodlequilting, modernquilting, diy, quilt, quilter, craftproject, homemade, artist, textile, color, geometry, modern, patchwork, art, do it yourself, quilting for beginners, quilting ideas, free motion, longarm quilting, free hand, modern quilting, tutorial, tutorials

Id: bFjXCHmUE0o

Length: 29min 2sec (1742 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018