A New Dawn
January 27, 2007 10:34AM | Filed Under Technique:Quilting |
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I won’t give you a blow-by-blow analysis of my time-keeping results to date. Suffice to say that, quite predictably, actual quilting time has been minimal and then not especially productive. For example, believe it or not, this is all I have to show for 7+hours of quilting on Sunrise-Sunset:
Whereas for Unplugged! I quilted the lines with a free-motion quilting foot with the feed dogs UP, for this quilt I am using the walking foot as I am looking for straighter lines. It has worked well in the centre where there are longer lines of quilting, although I could have perhaps saved myself the bother and just used corduroy for the piecing:
The hatching in the background is less successfully executed. As Lisa Call points out, stopping and turning corners is a painstaking process. It would be easier if my machine had a better “backwards” mode. However, the stitch formation when going “backwards” is not as tidy and I can’t see where I am going as the bulk of the walking foot attachment gets in the way:
As an aside, when I was considering buying a new sewing machine a few years ago, I took the time to try out several top-end models across a range of brands including: Janome, Bernina, Husqvarna and Pfaff. “Backwards” sewing was an exercise I sampled on all of the machines and none of the models did this well. In the end, I kept going with my Bernina 150QE. If you have better success with “backwards” stitching on your machine, I would be interested to know your secret.
Brenda,
What a marathon of sewing, it is very effective but as you said took a long time.
Judy
Comment by Judy — January 27, 2007 2:02 PM#
I think your quilting looks marvelous. I love the detail of the lines.
I don’t think any sewing machine makes a great stitch in reverse. It has to do with the direction of the thread and needle and how the stitch is being formed. Even the longarm machines make a better stitch when going forward.
Comment by DebGeyer — January 28, 2007 1:08 AM#
I have a Janome Memorycraft 6600 and whilst I have only used the reverse so far for short bits at the end of seams I will say that it doesn’t need a walking foot to quilt so you don’t get your problem of the mechanism blocking your view.
Comment by Helen — January 28, 2007 7:27 AM#
That is lovely quilting. I have the same problem with my elna. The reverse stitch seems to be just one stitch length. So it I have a short stitch length for sewing, when I reverse, the stitches seem longer for some unaccountable reason! (This is a different Helen from the Helen in the previous comment.)
Comment by Helen — January 31, 2007 7:59 AM#
Brenda,
I have a technique question…How is backwards stitching used in quilting? How would it eliminate the stopping and turning corners? I just can’t seem to picture it in my mind how it would be different from forward quilting.
Comment by Heather — March 15, 2007 3:30 AM#
[...] The beauty of using the reverse stitching/quilting function on your sewing machine is that you only have to rotate your quilt top 90 degrees for a short period of time before you straighten up the quilt again. By contrast, if you always quilt going forwards in the conventional manner, you have to manipulate your quilt a full 180 degrees under the throat of your machine - first 90 degrees to turn the corner and then another 90 degrees to come back again and so on. This is perhaps best illustrated in a diagram: In this diagram, the arrows show the direction that you are quilting and the blue line shows the orientation of the quilt top. If you can quilt backwards part of the time, this is infinitely easier than doing multiple big U-Turns with your quilt top. However, as I lamented on my “A New Dawn” post earlier in the year, I have yet to find any make, model or price sewing machine that neatly and reliably forms “backward” stitches for any decent period of time. How about you? [...]
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