Tips & Tricks for Quilting with a Walking Foot | Midnight Quilt Show with Angela Walters

a free motion quilting foot allows you to move the fabric in all different directions but a walking foot works with the feed dogs on your machine to pull the fabric through making it a little easier so my foot right here is my favorite because it has a nice clear open area so I can see where I'm going which is nice but your walking foot might be more narrow it might be wider it doesn't matter just use the one that you like so here's a few tips to get you started now when you get started the first thing I'm going to do is take a moment and make sure those teeth are cleaned out it's using this mechanism to pull that fabric through and if there's fuzzies in there it's not gonna grab it as much as it should when you go to put it on your sewing machine the thing to remember is there's usually a mechanism that clicks into some part of your machine on my particular foot it comes around the back and that's what helps make that walking motion but on some feet like this that fork actually hooks onto the front of the bar to create that so check your manual make sure you're installing it correctly trust me there's nothing worse than flipping through half a quilt realizing that it's not actually walking so the next thing I'm going to do is linked in the stitch length on my machine I like to use a 2.5 to 3 millimeter stitch length because since we're going through so many layers it just allows it to go a little bit further now let's get to quilting so you can use your walking foot to make all sorts of designs first and foremost straight lines that's kind of what it does so as I'm quilting it's just gonna pull that whole thing through so my only job is to really give it a guide or make sure it's going the right direction I want it to go so when you're picking up those straight line designs make sure it's not something that turns too much because that's a lot of repositioning the quilt but if you want to add a few little turns you definitely can I have my needle in the down position so when I stop it stops down I can just lift my foot and reposition the quilt in the direction I want to go so if I want to do some diagonal lines all I have to do is turn and continue on this is especially helpful if you're working on a large quilt and you don't want to have to wrestle the whole thing underneath from here I'm just gonna go a couple different directions and maybe I'll just go back to my straight lines the nice thing about this is those feed dogs are doing most of the work I'm just having fun quilting those straight kind of lines now here I'm just quilting on a small sandwich so you can see what's going on but if I were working on an actual quilt I'm gonna use the piecing as a guide to help keep it on track or I might mark some lines really whatever it does to help me see where I'm going once I put one line of the design I'm just gonna cut thread and start over again but I'm gonna use the foot of the machine to help keep that spacing consistent and then now I just have to run the foot along that previously quilted line that's gonna give me about a half inch spacing which I couldn't like and as I get to where I'm going to turn again having the needle in the down position lifting up and reposition the clothes so there you have it another thing you can use your walking foot to do is wavy lines now even though those feed dogs are pulling it in one direction I can still maneuver the quilt to give it a little bit of a wavy line and all I'm gonna do is to start quilting but as I quilt just gently go direction to direction you might be thinking hey I already do that when I'm quilting perfect you're way ahead of the rest of us you can see it's not too wavy but just enough to give it a little bit of movement now when I go to add my next line what I'm gonna do is I'm not gonna try to make them echo each other you could definitely but I'm gonna go for a more organic wavy line which means I don't really have to think about the previous one now don't forget to reposition your hands one of my biggest bad habits is I'll just keep my hands going if you need to reposition just stop reposition and then continue on I'm just do a few more of those and see how it turns out [Music] and there you can see those wavy lines they're not echoing each other they're just adding a nice look to it and if you didn't want it that dense you could spread those lines out further apart now the last thing I'm going to show you is you can actually use the decorative stitches on your machine with your walking foot so if your machine comes with all those fancy stitches you can just pick one and that can be your quilting design now my machine comes with all these fun stitches but what I don't want to pick is something really complex because that's just gonna take forever to quilt I'm gonna go with something a little bit more simple how about this nice wavy line right there so the machine is doing all the work all I have to do is guide the fabric then as it goes it's gonna quilt the design for me I love that [Music] so whether you use your walking foot to create straight lines wavy lines or even decorative stitches there's a lot of fun ways you can finish your quotes in fact Jackie Goering has a craxi class called creative quilting with your walking foot and it's amazing you can find out information about that and other resources by checking out the description box below

Channel: Midnight Quilt Show

Views: 150,688

Rating: 4.9508672 out of 5

Keywords: midnight quilt show, angela walters, craftsy, machine quilting, walking foot quilting, straight line quilting, how to quilt a lattice quilt, strip quilt quilting ideas, jelly roll quilting, beginner machine quilting, machine quilting on home machine, easy quilting for beginners, walking foot quilt designs, sewing machine quilting, quilting basics, quilting tutorial, types of walking feet, how to attach a walking foot, line quilting, parallel quilting

Id: CPpZCLWB2nk

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Tue May 08 2018