foot made for walking

the quilt batching continues. that group of quilts i got backed and basted went right on through to the quilting stage. my walking foot came out and had a big two day workout. i'm not generally a fan of my walking foot and straightline quilting, but there is a time and place for it. 

recently, i've been reading and rereading jolene's "a year of quilts" and "scrap quilt diary" at bedtime a lot. like many quilters, jolene has a go-to quilting preference: she most often, if she's doing it herself, will straightline quilt 1" apart, vertically. i've had that at the back of my mind lately since i've been looking at so many of her quilts. and she's right - it's pretty effective all the time.

so when i needed to make some quilting decisions, i thought about jolene's straight lines. the first quilt i was quilting was "bathsheba," my single girl quilt. i wanted to handquilt this one like all my other liberty + chambray quilts, but the slightly wobbly top needed some help. in the end i decided to do a combination: wide straightline quilting for stability and handquilting for decoration.

since i needed evenly-spaced quilt lines, i dug out the guide bar that attaches to my walking foot. i don't recall every using it before because i don't think i've ever actually done evenly spaced straightline quilting before. i've only every done echo quilting, stitch-in-the-ditch, or marked lines to follow.

this foot contraption is a beast! just look at all the parts and screws. i was lucky i found all the pieces and figured out how they went together (thank you manual). the guide foot can go on either side of the walking foot and has an adjustable bar, which is part of the reason it's so big and awkward. but it sure works for all those parts and things hanging out everywhere.

my quilt lines ended up being something like 1 3/4" apart simply because that was the smallest distance achievable with the guide foot to the left of the walking foot, which is where it made sense to me to have it when sewing.

that's not "bathsheba" in the photos of the foot - that's "grellow garden geese." after i completed "bathsheba," it felt logical to leave the same foot and thread on, and do the straightline all over again for this quilt. i did mean to do it vertically, not horizontally, this time, but i started out with the quilt turned horizontally, so just did it that way again. 

i considered doing vertical lines down the middle of each row of geese, right through their points. but once i was done with the horizontal lines, it was bedtime, so i called it a day and called the quilting done. it's a low-stakes quilt and i didn't feel the need to add anything else after all. plus, trying to do a straight line through all the geese tips might reveal more misalignments in the quilt top. the horizontal wobbles are already revealed this way, best to leave that alone.
 

when "sunny crossroads" came up for quilting, i thought for a while before committing. there is this great handquilting pattern i've seen for the crossroads pattern, which i've wanted to do for a while now. but i also know i have a lot of handquilting already in the queue. so i decided to do the same echo quilting i did on my previous crossroads quilts (here and here). that was still done with a walking foot and i could leave the gold thread on the machine because it would work with this yellow quilt, too.

don't the gathers in the quilt after it's passed through the foot look so pretty? i think so.

i got quilting away with my movie going on my phone nearby. after a few rows i realized i was only echo-quilting the joining seams and not echoing the roads like i intended too. i was not in a mood to go back and add the missed lines. so, i decided to keep going like i was and if i decided to add handquilting later on, this was a good compromise for stabilizing the quilt. it'll be another hybrid and that's great. it's not a fall quilt, so it's not like i'm in a hurry to get it completed and in service. maybe it can be my new spring break handstitching project? probably should finish the other one first, haha.

then it was time for the last basted quilt - "groovy liberty." it's going to be another handquilted liberty + chambray quilt, but it needed some stabilizing stitches. i don't want to see these machine stitches, so it was stitching-in-the-ditch on this one. and i finally had to change my thread color. gold wasn't going to blend here so i switched to a neutral grey i used for piecing most of these quilts. but the walking foot stayed. i was really happy not to change that foot.

i generally avoid stitch-in-the-ditch because i have a hard time keeping the stitches in the ditch and the whole point is that you don't see the stitches, they hide in the ditch. however, i was taking my time, sewing slow on that turtle, and was pretty shocked how invisible most of my stitching was, right up to the last line or two when i must have been a little tired. i think the thread blended really well, too, so the stitches that didn't make it actually in the ditch just don't show. 

i'm pretty shocked at myself for getting so much done recently. i'll say this in favor of straightline quilting - it's fast. really, really fast. i got most of these done within the span of one movie each. that's quite satisfying when you don't care so much about the quilt design, which i didn't for these quilt. as much as i like my modern loops fmq and orange peel design, this straightline thing has grown on me and will be making appearances again, i'm sure.