Machine Quilting Minky Fabric
 

Minky fabric is wonderfully soft in a baby quilt, but cutting and sewing can bring problems for the quilter.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to machine quilt minky fabric? I am having difficulty with thread breaking, tension messing up, and other assorted issues as the foot hits the humps and valleys on the minky fabric. No matter the speed or direction I am going, issues crop up.

Thanks in advance.
Sharon

I don't do a lot with Minky or fleece myself but I have done some, especially a number of years ago when I was using a friend's long arm. We always had to manually adjust the foot height -- I think the manual suggestion was to use a dime as the default but we had to move it up quite a bit from that.

I also find quite a bit of variation on the grain/stretch of the fabric and that something it is just easier to try turning the quilt around and quilting from a different direction and suddenly things just go better.

Good luck and I'll be watching the responses too.

I will be watching responses also as I would like to use minky as a backing for a quilt.

I do quilting on minky and fleece and don't seem to have to do anything out of the ordinary. I have a 6600 Janome and it handles it fine.

Same with me Karamarie. I do minky backings quite often and don't do anything differently. I do free motion quilting with my Pfaff. I do pin basting and use Quilters Dream 80/20 batting. I recently used a new to me minky that resembles rosettes or swirls and I was a little concerned how that would go, but luckily no problems. I do use a large size top stitch needle which I use for most FMQ.

With minky fabric backing, I SID and place newspaper between fabric and feed dog. It tears away easily after stitching.

Shannon Fabrics has a live tutorial tomorrow (Nov. 23rd) on working with Minky. Can’t remember what time it goes live…maybe worth watching.

Thanks for the heads up on the tutorial.

Also, I may double check the batting again. This may just be my problem.

Your suggestions are all worth investigating.

Always use a polyester thread instead of cotton. Polyester has just enough stretch that it behaves better than cotton for free-motion.