Quiltingboard Forums - FMQ Baptist Fans on DSM

I love the look of baptist fans but was too afraid of the amount of work in basting, marking, and then the actual quilting. A few months ago, I tried it out on a section of a practice quilt and it turned out ok, so I decided to try it on a bigger quilt to see what it was like. I've come up with a few ideas that have made it doable for me. It's not perfect, and I never expected it to be, but I'm having fun and from a few feet away, I think it looks ok!

My machine only has a 6 inch throat and I don't have needle down, so I would assume if you have better than what I have, this would be so much easier. I'm using an open toe embroidery foot that is clear at the foot, and since I'm doing this FMQ and I knew I would be working the quilt from both sides, I feel that the clear foot really helps me since I can mostly see my marked lines regardless of which direction I'm traveling.

I marked with a crayola washable marker that I wrapped a small piece of shelf liner around before tying a piece of string to it. Then, I marked the string with permanent sharpie to try to guesstimate how far apart to space the blades. I made marks 1.5in apart, and decided that 5 blades in each fan was a good number for moving the direction I wanted to go, with the size that I liked. I just held down the string with one hand, thumb on the mark, and tried to keep the marker as perpendicular to the quilt as I could. After a couple rows, the smaller blades were actually easier to freehand, and then just use the marks for the bigger blades.

After glue basting and marking the entire quilt, I started on one edge and worked my way towards the center. I have a foam insulation topper on my table to make the surface level with the bed of my machine, and over the years I've found that Machingers gloves really do make a difference. I've tried gardening gloves, scrubbing pads, gripping with shelf liner, and with nothing, and once I splurged on a pair of Machingers, I'm never going back. I like that the gloves are stretchy and snug to my hand and I'm not fighting to grip the quilt.

I've fmq around a dozen lap to king sized quilts so far on my machine, so I'd say I have some experience quilting on it and for me, a combination of rolling the quilt up plus accordion folding or pleating the quilt inside the harp seems to work best for me. Some people may call it puddling, but in my head, pleats seems to work better. For me, I also like to make a "frame" around where I work by making a pleat around where I place my hands. It seems to make the distribution of weight better since I'm not trying to keep the quilt flat and dragging the entire thing each time I move my hands. It really helped to have a pleat in the front of the machine, between the machine and me, when there was a lot of quilt in my lap so that I wasn't trying to drag the quilt up over the edge of the table.

There is probably 25% left to quilt, but the end is in sight and it's getting easier as I approach the edge. I was really worried that it was going to be too difficult for me when I reached the center and flipped the quilt around to quilt the fans in a backwards motion from what I had been doing, but it turned out to not be as hard as I thought. It's a little more challenging because the markings are behind the foot, so I'm definitely not able to look as far ahead as from the other direction, but going slower and repositioning often is working out ok.

Of course, with machine quilting, you will have a little bit of traveling between blades unless you purposely space your fans out a little so that the blades are not connected. I preferred the look of traveling, so I nested my fans beside each other and as long as I go slowly when traveling, it's not too noticeable.

It's been fun and with 2 very young kids at home, I don't really have the funds to send a quilt out to be quilted. This was a neat way to attempt it on my own. Try it out! Hope this helps someone :)