Question Thursday #28

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

5 Responses

  1. Amy says:

    Leah, you say that the only thing you MUST change is the foot, but I actually discovered that if you are desperate, you can get by without even doing that. I'm working on a quilt where I recycled a fabric that had spots of loosely woven thread. I knew it wasn't the best choice for a quilt, but I wanted to use it for sentimental reasons. My free motion foot is the open "C" shaped type and the ends of the foot kept snagging under the loose fabric threads, making quilting impossible. The closed "O" shape type of foot would have worked fine, but I don't have one and was too impatient to wait to order one. My machine has a foot pressure adjustment and as you loosen the pressure, the foot raises up so that it doesn't push down so hard on the fabric. With my all-purpose zig-zag foot, I loosened the pressure until the foot was high enough to allow my quilt to move easily. Visibility was not good, but I used a basic wavy grid design that I could manage with the reduced visibility. It worked fine and the stitch quality was the same as the rest of the quilt where I used the FM foot. Although it worked for my problem, in the future, I'll stick with better fabric and FM foot!

  2. Louisa says:

    Hi Leah,

    I have another question.

    What would you suggest for quilting a large quilt (single bed or larger) on a machine with its' own table (it's a Janome QXL 605), when I don't have a proper machine table with a cutout? I am having trouble because a), the table isn't actually attached to the machine and gets dragged around by the quilt when I move it and b), the quilt is catching on the corners of the table and making it very hard to machine smoothly. I can't afford the machine table or the space to put it in, so I really must learn to work this way.

  3. What a great idea for small wall quilt storage Leah~ Thanks so much for sharing the how-to for making those kind of noodles. Love the idea and will use it. See you on Sunday on the net~
    Godspeed,
    mary

  4. MC says:

    I've noticed that the number one thing that determines the quality of FMQ on my machine (a Kenmore) is the needle. Anything smaller than 90/14 is a disaster. As soon as I switch to a larger needle it makes a world of difference. Took me weeks to figure it out, but I've been really happy with my machine ever since.

  5. Cyn ;-) says:

    Love your storage solution. Great idea. Thank you for sharing it.
    Also want to say, I DID IT! I finally got off the fence and tried some 'real' FMQing. It went well; not great, but acceptable. Thank you so much for all you share with our quilting community. I will continute to practice… thanks again!

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