Practicing free-motion quilting with the PFAFF performance icon

It takes time and practice to improve at free-motion quilting. I’m by no means an expert, but I’m getting better at practicing! In yesterday’s post, I got the PFAFF performance icon ready for free-motion quilting so today there are no more excuses. It’s the time!

Doing the same thing every time you sit down to the machine to free-motion quilt won’t necessarily improve your quilting. I used the features on the PFAFF performance icon to try different things and find my comfort level.

Not all free-motion quilting is the same. Sometimes you want to use free-motion quilting to fill in the background on a quilt and you’ll want to use swirls or repeat a geometric pattern. Other times you may want to quilt straight lines around applique or shapes in a panel or even details in a fabric print. I decided that my practice time needed to be divided around these two different purposes so I could get better at both.

I started out with the Open Toe Free-Motion foot. I also practiced with the Embroidery/Sensormatic Free-motion foot – this one is also called presser foot 6A and is included with the performance icon.

The name of the foot also does a good job describing its best feature; in this case, the material of the foot is clear so you see through it and it’s also open toe – meaning there’s no material at the front opening of the foot.

The Open Toe Free-Motion foot attaches to the machine using the screw at the back of the presser foot bar. It’s easier to see in the photo below.

I selected the Spring Foot Free-Motion (optional) choice on the menu in the Multi-Touch Screen. How did I know which option to choose? The packaging for the foot told me! But sometimes just the name of the foot will be the clue you need – dynamic, spring, etc.

You can find all of the optional feet on the PFAFF accessory page.

It’s a good idea to have some practice quilting sandwiches ready to use. Layer a piece of the type of batting that you use for your quilting projects between two pieces of quilting fabric. It’s good if at least one of the fabrics is solid so you can see what the stitches look like as you practice. If you can see the stitches on both the top and the bottom it will help you see what type of adjustments you need to make to improve your free-motion quilting.

I also purposely chose thread you can see on the practice sandwich – again to help me learn and improve. Sometimes you might also want to practice with different threads before you use them on a project as well because not all threads are the same thickness and this affects how they stitch out on your quilt.

With the machine setting selected, it’s time to start free-motion quilting. I started with swirls and was happy to see that I could find a comfortable speed to make them round and not angular. My stitches are quite large but mostly consistent.

Adjusting the speed of the performance icon is easy to do using the slider on the side of the machine. Figuring out how fast the machine should go to match the speed of your hands moving the fabric is one of the things to practice! For me, it’s not that fast 🙂

I drew myself a flower with a stem and leaves to practice free-motion quilting around motifs. I switched to presser foot 6A for this work – it uses the Sensormatic setting.

I liked the feel of the presser foot 6A and continued practicing with it; with this foot you can hear and feel the difference when you increase your speed enough to have the foot hover over the fabric. I tried continuing the free-motion straight lines into swirls around my drawn flower.

The reverse side of the practice panel helped reveal if my stitches were coming out even on both sides. If the stitches look good on the back as well it usually indicates that you have found that sweet spot of hand and machine moving in sync with each other.

I felt pretty confident with this combination of thread and presser foot and think I’m ready for more. The PFAFF performance icon helped push my curiosity into creativity and I’m ready to try free-motion quilting on an actual project.