unuasual quilting idea...will it work and look good?
 

I have a very basic machine so straight or grid quilting is my options. I was thinking of starting at one corner and letting the foot meander on its own and kind of guiding it to the opposit corner. Then begin following that line with the presser foot to the right corner. Of course I would follow the line to the left corner also. So in my mind this would be combining fmq and straight line quilting. Has anyone ever did this or seen it? I only do small quilts like doll and baby. I dont think it would be to hard.

This will be much more interesting than just straight line or SITD. Keep the curves gradual and you should have no trouble, even using a walking foot if your wish. Good luck.

And yes, I have done this with no difficulty.

I agree; especially since I'm not proficient at SITD, I have better luck with gentle curves.

In my mind straight line quilting should be straight. I find it easiest to run a strip of painters tape or masking tape from one corner to the opposing corner for doing that first striaght line on a DSM. Then use the guide on your presser foot. If you wobble or bow out just letting the machine foot meander on the quilt as it goes along, it probably won't look very nice. You will end up with a bowed line that is straight in someplaces and not so straight in others and it will give the appearance that you were being careless and will only be magnified by echoing it over the entire quilt. Better to make it either straight as you possibly can or serpantine it with some sort of regularity. Otherwise it will just look like a straight line of quilting that bowed out in places.

This is of course JMHO and it is your quilt to do with as you wish. And I have seen modern quilts done in a way that does look like a straight line gone awry but I believe the quilter purposely manipulated the line to waver in a specific spot ala Angela Walters.

A better option for a wobbly line is to make it more obviously serpantine or pick an area in the quilt you want the line to gently bow and echo that.

My Brother machine has a serpantine stitch that I enlarge the width and lenght of the stitch so it does a meandering stitch. If you change setting of your stitches you can use the preprogramed designs in your machine. I only do small quilts so the various stitches look nice on them.

there are rulers that are shaped in curves. You might try one of these type and give a definite pattern to the line.
But you can free motion with a regular machine. Get a darning foot for the machine and tape a card or plati over the fee dog and dial the stitch down to 0

I did something similar for a recent show quilt because I didn't want my FMQ to take my quilt out of contention. I did do it in a bit more planned fashion.

I took wide masking tape and made a foot long flat piece with about five layers of tape. I cut a gentle curve along one long edge, similar to a serpentine pattern. I stuck it down to my quilt starting at the spot I wanted to begin and I used my walking foot to stitch along the curve of the masking tape. When I got towards the end of the masking tape, I unstuck the tape and placed it in the next spot and resumed stitching. I repeated until I got to the end of the line.

When the tape lost its stickiness I peeled off the bottommost layer of tape and it was good as new. The good part was that by the time it lost its stickiness I had stitched enough that I didn't need the masking tape template to follow any longer.

This quilt had different size blocks in it and I also made templates for those. The same thing happened; after I used them a few times I no longer needed them.

The quilt took a third place ribbon, so I guess it worked okay, and it looked better than my free motion would have.

Sounds good. Just make sure you are not pulling the quilt as all your stitching will be on the bias, unless the quillt was set on point. I think I would alternate the stitching lines to form an "X" to keep it from skewing. Sew from NW to SE corners, then from SW to NE corners, then keep alternating. This will give a diamond shape pattern rather than channels.

I would not try to do straight lines make them kinda wavy