Originally Posted by Joanieu
The stitches look too small and look like they are all crumped together plus I am not able to keep the stitches in the ditch. It just looks too messy - I am trying it on the quilt I am making for myself.
Stitching in the ditch is very difficult.
solution - - use a decorative stitch and stitch along the line of the seam, or use a slight zig zag stitch.
Machine quilting a full quilt without having enough support of it to keep it from pulling against the feed dogs
solution - - push the table your machine is sitting on into a corner, having the corner at the left (northwest) of your machine, the machine sitting on the lower right of the table. This will keep your quilt from dragging the quilt through your machine too fast out the back. or dragging off to the left side because the wall is really your friend.
Use another table sitting at your left - - or your ironing board set as close to your table height as possible ... added support for your quilt.
Practice does make perfect, but as I said .... SID is very difficult for the best of us. (which is one of the reasons I started free motion quilting <g>) I can quilt faster and cover more area with FMQ than SID ... there are a number of great tutorials and threads on this board to encourage you ... I salute you for your love of handquilting.
Yes, the machine is faster, but there is much more satisfaction in your hand quilting - - needle workers know where of you speak. <wave>