If you are free-motion quilting this is what the guy at my shop told me today. Make sure your presser foot is up when threading the machine. Otherwise, the tension discs are not opened up and it causes looping on the back of the quilt. I found this out by error and called them for help today.

Good luck hon.... (((( hugs)))

thanks to everyone for their helpful suggestions.

When I took my quilting class, we took a plain muslin sandwich block and drew lines across the top in 1" increments and marked each line, starting with 1. (Mine ended with 9 because that was the highest number for my tension)

Then we set the tension to "1" and sewed ACROSS those lines from 1 to 2. At 2, we changed the tension to "2" and sewed to line 3. (and so on)

When you have sewn with ALL of the tension settings, you can easily review what your machine does and which tension settings work best with that batting.

We were encouraged to try the same nethod using different threads, needles, and batting.