The story of my generic walking foot – or rather lack thereof – is so long and boring that I’ll skip to the part where I’m showing the first project made with it.
I seem to learn best when watching demonstrations, so when there was a sale at Craftsy, I enrolled in Jacquie Gering’s class Creative Quilting with your Walking Foot. As usual my level of confidence has gone up through the roof.
Months ago, when sewing together a front panel for my mom’s iPad cover, I also improvised two smaller pieces for myself. I squared them up to 5.5” and then the troubles with finding a walking foot began, so I forgot about them until yesterday’s un-earthing of miscellaneous this and that in the WIP box.
Here’s where I picked up where I had left them:
My first quilting project ready to be pin basted
Maybe you recognise the scraps from Piece of Cake 3?
Finding batting was another ordeal, but luckily there are many great shops within the EU (to avoid high shipping fees and possible import taxes) to choose from. This is Warm & White.
The mug-rug backing is cut from an old thin curtain of mine and I was a bit nervous about how it would behave during quilting.
I started with the lighter mug rug and quite soon noticed something that I’d kindly label as “you get what you pay for”:
Walking foot issue
The needle is in middle position when using other presser feet, but as you can see the placement on this walking foot is way off to the right. In her class, Jacquie talks about features of a well-designed foot and none have been added to this one. The widths and holes of the (quite closed) sole plate have no connection to fractions of inches and there are no markings on it either.
I’ve decided not to fret about this, but will use the available “lines” in combination with the foot guide and outside markings (masking tape, hera marker, etc.), and once I upgrade to a better sewing machine in the future, I’ll see to it that all the requirement boxes have been ticked. Live and learn, and accept the challenge for now…
The quilting I chose for the first mug rug was simple, just straight lines as parallel as possible. In the photo above they are close to a quarter inch and then I got the idea to do matchstick quilting like Jacquie teaches.
The second rug was quilted around a first line of zigzag that I made. I hadn’t planned any of it, but just let my hands translate random ideas, and there were no guide markings made anywhere. All I did was use a few lines on the walking foot:
Two kinds of quilting
As you can see, I’ve reached the binding stage already. I found a tutorial by Dana Made It, but since it didn’t cover how to handle corners I looked some more. The one by Prudent Baby looked so similar at first glance that I kept going with Dana’s version. Later I got confused because Prudent was “upside down” all of a sudden.
I had already pinned the single-fold tape in place on the darker mug rug, but removed it again. Personally I think there are a few more positives to the Prudent Baby tutorial and I want to see whether I like the look of that version more. And that’s where we are right now, so stay tuned for part 2! Despite smaller hickups I truly love this craft!
Nina With Freckles 