May FMQ Entry

Wow, last day of May is here already. Almost missed this one, but here's my May entry for Sew Cal Gal's Free Motion Quilting Challenge. Check it out, if you haven't already. Great prizes, but also lots of wonderful tips and techniques from the guest experts!

  This month the expert was Leah Day. She had so many great ideas. My favorite was one I'd never heard of before. She said that sometimes when you lower the feed dogs on some machines it can cause trouble; so you can do FMQ by setting the stitch length to zero and leaving the feed dogs up. Well, I have an older machine that I just couldn't FMQ on - every time I would try the tension would go haywire and I'd get a series of bird's nests on the back. Frustrating! So I tried her tip - and it worked! I can now FMQ on it just fine. Here's my sample done on that machine.

I actually did this a couple of weeks ago. I was so excited that it worked, that I've been quilting a couple of charity quilts on it. When I get them done, I'll post pictures here. This was a great lesson for me - my lines are still shaky, but the lesson wasn't too hard and I think I'm getting better at thinking ahead and filling the space. Yeah!

Tomorrow's June. Can't wait for the next Challenge expert, Cindy Needham. It was her blog and her Open Thread Bar workshop that first got me started on this. I love her work!