Machine Quilting, Not Free-Motion...Tips?
 

I'm looking for interesting patterns for machine quilting with nothing more than a walking foot. I have an older, slant needle machine that does not work well with free motion quilting, so I do not want to do that and I don't want to send my quilt to a long-armer. I know...there's stitch-in-the-ditch and following the contours, but perhaps you've seen something more interesting. If so, please share. Thanks!

~ C

When I was using my vintage machine I found I couldn't do much in the middle of a queen sized quilt, and so I typically used various types of grids and gentle curves and then did something fancier around the border. Orange peel and clam shell would be example of doable curves. Pumpkin seed slightly fancier but nice border for an orange peel center.

Keep in mind the ideas of echoing and repeating and multiple passes, so you can have a chain of squares that takes a little more effort, but then you can echo that with a zig zag (slightly easier) and then straight lines on either side of that. Then you can separate out and either introduce a different design element or keep repeating the original set.

Thanks Iceblossom...good ideas. I am planning to quilt a larger quilt, so I'll keep those thoughts in mind. Zig-zag...do you mean the decorative stitch on my machine? I have a lot of different cams that I could use for special interest.

~ C

I really meant echoing the squares with a zig-zag, but we can also use fancy stitches. By the way, typically in quilting like this you do as long a movement as you can, so for a single chain of squares you would go the diagonal of two squares, leave the needle down, pivot to the next direction, doing half the lines in one pass. Then you complete the lines in a second pass. You don't typically want to make two zig zags to make the squares, or out line each square individually.

My modern machine does the serpentine stitch and it is a wonderful solution for making a grid a bit fancier and will be my go-to solution for any standard gridded quilt. I just used it for the first time last year, but one of my Tuesday quilting ladies uses it on almost all her donation quilts and it looks good on all of them so far!

You can achieve the serpentine look manually, but in the picky part of my brain, I'd still have to draw it out and actually follow lines and not be able to do it free hand.

This was my project, the batting was a little thicker than I wanted and the fabric came in a bag from the thrift store so I didn't quite have the yardage I wanted... and I should have relaxed the wavy stitch a bit more to echo the fabric but had started in the middle of the quilt and decided to keep it as it is...

Maybe this will give you some inspiration. Leah Day has some tutorials on walking foot quilting.

https://leahday.com/pages/walking-foot-quilting-basics

Here's a scan to better show what I was saying, am looking for links/resources --

I use stencils. By drawing with a diapering ink on the block where I want my work to be, give me the best design work ever. There are so many different stencils available that you can pick and choose what is right for your quilt. For me I use mostly intermediate level stencils or an easy one. Those are what I am comfortable. LQS usually carry a good variety.

Ahh...spellcheck...LOL. I was wondering what, "diapering ink," was. How, exactly, do you use that? :D

Thanks for the great tips. I do have a couple of stencils that I haven't tried yet. Maybe I'll go shopping for a few more. That's always fun!

~ C

Oh...OK...a larger zig-zag. That looks cool. I have used a random, serpentine before, (Not echoing. The stitching lines don't line up perfectly with one another,) and it actually turned out better than I was hoping for. It was pretty easy to do on a larger quilt too. You can also do a serpentine, but, "bump into," the other line, creating a leaf effect.

~ C

Thanks Krisb...Leah Day is a wonderful teacher, IMHO. I'll head over there.

~C