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.
Judy says
Brenda,
What a marathon of sewing, it is very effective but as you said took a long time.
Judy
DebGeyer says
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.
Helen says
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.
Helen says
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.)
Heather says
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.