Quilting on DSM (not long-arm)
 

How long does it take you to quilt a large quilt on your DSM?
Please specify if it's Straight lines or FMQ or both.

It takes me several days to quilt on my DSM. I do basic straight line quilting.(I enjoy shadowing the seams best.) Sometimes zig zags. (small quilts only) I find that I have to break it up in several lines at a time. Sometimes it's a struggle to manipulate a large quilt. Queen size is the largest I will quilt. I prefer Double quilts and smaller. (But, my bed is a queen size. So every now and then I need to quilt a queen.)

I only started FMQ on my DSM earlier this year, but have quilted 4 queen sized (100"x100") quilts and they took 25 or so hours to quilt. I used about 3000 yds of thread, so the quilting was pretty dense. I used my new Juki TL2010Q and found it pretty easy to move the quilt around under the harp. I found (after the first quilt) that only pinning the center of the quilt sandwich until that section was quilted made it much easier to keep any wrinkles from developing in the back, as I would loosely pin the next section I was going to quilt only after more central sections were done. This also made assembling the quilt take much less time--under an hour, which is much less than it took when I pinned the entire thing in one go (and had to move many pins as I got away from the center of the quilt).

I'd like to add to my prior post that although these were the first quilts that I had machine quilted, I have done many, many hand quilted queen sized quilts in the past, and there I always pinned fairly closely in the middle and only widely further out, so it made it more like what I was used to doing. I machine quilted a couple of baby quilts with straight line quilting and a walking foot and found that uni-directional quilting such as long lines is much more awkward for me than FMQ and filling in a squarish area.

I generally do straight lines, and a good size lap or twin will take me 6 to 8 hours I'm guessing. I've gotten pretty speedy as it used to seem like it took forever. I usually break it up into 2 to 3 sessions. Of course, all depends on how dense the quilting is - mine probably averages about 2-3 inches apart.

I don't keep track of hours, but it takes me much less time to do a meander FMQ than any straight line stitching with the walking foot. For me personally, I don't do dense quilting, so maybe that's why the meander takes me less time. And I've always liked doing it and how it looks.

thanks easypeasy for asking this question... this is great information

Well I don't do large quilts anymore, no fun!! But I FMQ (meander) lap quilts. They are generally 44 x 60. I can finish one in 2 hours.

The time it takes me to quilt depends on many issues such as how densely I quilt and how complicated the pattern is that I am quilting also how much stress my shoulders and hands can stand on a particular day. . I'm currently working on a scrappy coin quilt, pretty big. I am ditching the coins and doing a bamboo stalk in each of the plain columns between the coins. I'd say it is going to take me about 15 hours total but that is working maybe 3-4 hours on any day.