Don't give up! Your first piece looked fine except for the tension issue and you got that fixed. It just takes practice. Soon you'll get into a rhythm and even though you do have to stop to reposition your hands and the quilt you'll find that it is not a big deal. The joy of FMQ sit down style is that you can do just about any size design you want once you get the hang of it.

Rob

Right, but it was the top thread, not the bobbin thread. But, as you said your machine wouldn't go if the presser foot was up, so my guess had to be wrong. My second guess would be that something was amiss in the threading. I'd take all the thread out, clean all the tension discs and then re-thread.

This was my first idea. When I first saw what happened, I expected that the machine was not threaded correctly. It seemed as though the thread was going through the tension disks.

I always have a sandwich made from scraps and check the tension when I start and when I change bobbins. It saves a lot of time doing the frog stitch.

Usually if I rethread it corrects it. This happened to me a couple times. I left it and washing corrects most of that issue. It happened on a row while doing a panto. I didn't have time to pick it out.

I had the exact thing happen with my Janome 6000. I'd had never had a problem like that before and have machine quilted quite a bit. I assumed it was my machine and it was time to bring it in for it's yearly check. They did not fine anything wrong and said it was fine and it has not done it since. The positive: it is fairly easy to remove since it is a loose stitch and I was only 1/4 into a baby quilt.

woody, same here. I do lots better with feed dogs up and pressure on the foot as low as it can go. If I put the feed dogs down, wham.. too tight.

I've gone to hand quilting! I've not given up but the stress & pressure I was putting on myself was not good. I did just finish a SITD project & I did a straight line motion quilting (lots of turns) but FMQ is hard for me because I can't keep the big picture in focus & I keep stopping and starting to decide where to go next. Even marking with blue pen or using glad stick wrap with pattern drawn on it(awful, stuck in every stitch), I decided to walk away from FMQ for now.

I'm sure I haven't had 8 hrs of practice so that's probably what I need to try. Lots of good tips here but for free motion stuff I think I'll visit my favorite long armer! Me & my walking foot will stick to the straight & narrow! :thumbup:

I have seen that very problem on my own work in the beginning of trying to FMQ on my domestic machine. It was causing me a lot of upsetment and frustration as I had been practising, practising, practising on small practice pieces and felt that it was good enough to try doing it on a quilt.

Off I went the top was good and the bottom just as you are showing. After spending 4 hours of pulling it out and being very upset about the whole thing I went to bed and suddenly woke up around 2 am remembering that I had read about a problem like this on the "net". I got up very early and onto the "net to google" around and sure enough I found what I had read.

It was all about the weight of the quilt dragging down so in order to counteract this problem I turned my machine to the side and put a lot of books on either side of the machine to bring it up even to the bottom of the machine so that the quilt was level and there was no weight on either side - going into the machine and coming out of the machine - to drag down.

The moment of truth was about to happen as I sat there all nervous, anxious and sweating to try out my hideous contraption and out came a perfect result. I hope this helps and I will try and find a photo of what I did so you can see what worked for me.

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