bkay

I'm quilting my first quilt on my domestic sewing machine with a walking foot today. It's an I Spy quilt that is about 60" X 60" I've watched videos, asked questions and followed some advice carefully. I used warm and natural batting, spray basted the fabric and not the batting, starched the backing and the top and used blue tape to mark my lines. I sewed around the edge first, then started diagonal lines.

I volunteered to help school children make wheel chair quilts in the fall, so it's not the absolute first encounter with machine quilting. We used JoAnn's brand of natural batting that was a little softer (and maybe thinner). Those were smaller quilts, but they weren't all that stiff. They were not starched, but they were spray basted.

This one is almost like wrestling a piece of cardboard through the harp of the machine. (I'm quilting on a vintage sewing machine, so the harp space is adequate.) It's so stiff that it hangs up everywhere. I taught the kids to "stuff and fluff", but this quilt won't "fluff".

What can I do next time to make this easier and more pleasant to do? Does the heavy starch make it that much more less likely to end up with puckers? Is it the combination of everything I did that messed it up? Did I just go too far?

I should finish quilting this today and I have two more in the queue that I hoped to start on this weekend. I'd prefer to work on a softer product, but I don't want a lot of puckers, either.

Advice on finding the happy medium would be appreciated.

bkay