My machine (Janome 4800) has a selection of decorative stitches that I've very rarely used, but this afternoon I began to wonder if I could use them for quilting, as I'm quilting a wall hanging, a log cabin Christmas tree (very appropriate to be working on that at the summer solstice of course...!) and am totally stuck as to how to quilt the background. So, with no idea of how I'm supposed to go about this, I've been experimenting. I've tried 3 patterns, a snowflake and 2 stars, the idea being to do short vertical lines of stitches randomly on the quilt. They all worked well on my practice piece, but on the actual quilt there were a lot of skipped stitches and sometimes only half the pattern. I was trying to keep off the seams, but I'm guessing that the log cabin blocks may have been the problem, as the practice piece, with no seams, was OK. I started with the walking foot, but found that I got better results with an ordinary one. The simplest of the stars is now coming out OK.
I'd be interested to hear any advice or thoughts from the experts on here on using decorative stitches for quilting.