Kwiltr

Hi. Be forworned, this is a saga....
Have any of you using a longarm or midarm quilting machine ever noticed a difference in thread tension when quilting a Batik Quilt? I have been working on quilting a completely batik pieced quilt, I.e. Front and back all batik, with a Hobbs 80/20 batting, spray basted. I quilt on a Sweet Sixteen midarm sitdown. I am quilting with Glide polyester thread. I've had more tension issues than ever with this quilt, trying to get a balanced stitch. I always do a test stitch on a practice piece and in this case have used a sandwich of the exact same fabric. I can get the tension so it looks perfect on top, at least very good, with slight pokies, but I'm using same thread top and bottom, so expect once I wash it that'll disappear completely, but that back is another story. It looks good on testing and then when working on the quilt find the tension gets iffy on the back meaning the stitches go through periods of being less defined, like the tension is too loose, other areas look great. I had many incidents where the thread appears to 'catch' and then my tension is off for about an inch and then resumes stitching fine, or sometimes just throws a bunch of top thread into a nest on the back. Of course I have to stop to clean it up but couldn't figure that one out until I called a dealer and she told me that what was limit happening was the Glide thread was popping out of then tension discs intermittently and then popping back in. So, to alleviate this, wind/loop the thread through the tension discs so it can't. Of course you have to adjust/dial back your tension as a result. I also upped my needle size from a 14 to a 16. So I've pretty much solved that problem. However, I wonder if winding that thread around the tension disc area is now giving me inconsistent tension issues of a different sort. Anyone with any insight on this? I've done a ton of quilting with Glide and not had so many issues! I've got 4 Million stitches on my machine, you'd think I'd have it down pat by now :-(.

Now, onto the bobbin thread area. I get a lot of grief with backlash or over spin or whatever you want to call it, so to alleviate that I have to increase the tension the backlash spring puts on the bobbin, especially when the bobbin is full, with the extra weight of a full bobbin. of course as the bobbin empties and becomes lighter, I think the tension on the bobbin thread changes and that also might be affecting my tension, and so I'd need to readjust my backlash spring tension again, backing off the pressure to counteract that. Does this make sense to you experienced longarmers? I am so frustrated with playing with tension on my machine I could drink more! I rarely seem to get the perfect stitches that I see on quilts quilted by the pros and it's really disappointing. I've tried dialing back my expectations, but I need to figure this out. Any comments? Just as an additional note, I've seen comments by Midarm users that they only wind their bobbin to 2/3 or 3/4 to alleviate backlash or other issues, but what's the point of having a high capacity bobbin if you can't fill it?? (M Style in S16).

So to summarize, does batik cause any behavioral issues? Are my tension issues fixable? Are my expectations realistic to get that perfect stitch? Is there something I could do differently to remedy my tension woes?
Thanks for your sympathies, if nothing else 😉😀!