Does anyone here FMQ on a Singer 66? (AKA The best laid plans....)
 

Sometimes our best-laid plans go a little awry, right?! I have a Singer 66 Red-Eye (my Ambrozina!) that I just purchased a motor for... so now she can be used either hand-crank or electric. Awesome! Then I decided to buy a feed dog cover plate for her, so I could try FMQ. Got it yesterday...perfect! I'm very pleased. (Fantastic service from Sew-Classic.com, by the way.)

However, this morning I am thinking....she's a back-clamp machine... uh-oh! What do I do about a FMQ foot? I've researched, and it looks like a darning foot was never made for these back-clamp machines anyway, so I won't bother trying to find one (all of the back-clamp feet seem to be dearly priced, when they can be found at all).

Do I try rigging up a darning spring? Change out the machine to be a side-clamp? (I have the directions saved, but that may be a little above my expertise!) I'm stumped right now. Any ideas, folks?

I have done some FMQ on my Red Eye, but she has regular side clamping feet. To set it up for FMQ, I removed the feed dogs, saving them carefully for when I want to put them back someday. Did your machine come with a quilting foot? It has open, short feet and a side guide for keeping things even. I'll try to attach a photo of mine here. Oops, sorry about the huge photo. Anyhow, if you should need a set of attachments for your back-clamping machine, I have a set I'd be willing to part with, since I don't have a back-clamping machine of my own.[ATTACH=CONFIG]288195[/ATTACH]

I love my darning spring!!! Works better than anything.

I just got a red eye singer 66. Haven't had a chance to sew on it yet. Does the feed dogs drop? I didn't think so? I do my FM on a Singer 15, feed dogs drop on it. I don't use any foot for it! Thanks for the information, I am looking at the attachments, got a lot of them! NOt sure what a darning spring foot looks like.

JLM - thanks for identifying the foot

Ask Lost51-he knows all about this stuff.

I have on mine, I use a spring thingie that fits right on the needle bar not the foot bar. It works pretty good but I use the same color bobbin thread as the top thread in case of any looping. I tried putting one of those magic bobbin washers under the bobbin but it did not work, it made it worse. I prefer to use the 15-91 for fmq but you can use your 66.
Gwen

I have heard of people FMQ with no foot at all.. and I've seen springed needles for doing just that -- just be very careful not to jerk the needle and break it in the layers of you quilt....

Thanks guys! I already have a darning spring so I'll give that a try... in fact, I think I even have one of those needles that shnnn mentioned, with the spring attached, which I forgot was in my collection of "stuff". I'm determined to get this to work, one way or another!

I have seven treadle machines in my collection of machines and have these feet for quilting. However when I tried quilting with them in straight lines, a while back now, I found the fabric puckered a bit. Is there a trick to using these that may help me as I am about to try some more quilting on them? (For FMQ I tape a shiny business card over the feed dogs with a small hole I have made manually in it. )