Leaf Quilt Part II

The weekend was productive. First of all my frustration with my sewing machine got resolved On Sat morning when I went on a course to learn more about the sewing machine that I now have. A friend of mine decided to by a brand new Janome with all the bells and whistles this summer and they don’t give much on trade ins (a few hundred dollars) so she offered me her old Husqvarna machine for what she would have gotten as a trade in. Well I snapped that offer up since mine was an ancient temperamental Singer and her machine was only a few years old.

She was also at the class learning about her new machine on Sat. She bought it at the Oakville Sewing Centre, where she had also bought her old one. The class was learning about your computerized sewing machine. It was well worth the $35 that I had to spend since I learned a lot about the machine. My friend’s class was free, part of her deal when she purchased it. So everything worked fine that was covered in class.

At the end I asked Linda (store owner) if she could help me with the free motion quilting to see what was going on. So I switched everything over to free motion quilting and it was doing the crap again. Well Linda took one look and was a bit embarrassed to say the least. It turned out that when my friend had bought the various attachments, someone has sold her the wrong free motion quilting foot. It was for a higher model and would never work on this model. Linda apologized for the mistake and replaced it free of charge even though it was a few years old.

So not only did I learn more about my machine but now I had the right quilting foot. So I spent a good part of the weekend catching up on my quilting and now all the blocks of the leaf quilt are done. Each one is free motion quilted with a leaf or tree outline. Below are a couple of pictures of the ones that are easier to see given that I used green thread on green fabric. I still have to practice more to get my stitches more evenly spaced, but at least the machine is behaving itself.

Also I would like to say thanks to Quilt Pixie for her advice on how to hold the fabric while doing the free motion quilting, that also made a big difference.