Quilting made easy with the dual feed foot on the Dreamweaver XE

Yesterday on QUILTsocial I finished assembling the Double Wedding Ring quilt top. Today I’ll use the Brother Dreamweaver XE to quilt it. This is exciting!

Layer the top, batting and backing.

I love using Odif 505 Spray for basting small quilts like this table topper (and for felted wool applique). I spray it onto the batting and then lay the top onto it. Then I flip it over and spray the batting again and smooth the backing on top.

One more flip to smooth out the wrinkles on the top and I’m ready to go!

I’ve got the dual feed foot installed onto the Dreamweaver XE. It is so great for quilting because it pulls all of the layers of the quilt through at the same time, eliminating the possibility of puckers.

Always use a scrap of fabric layered with batting and backing to test the tension before machine quilting. I’ve stuck one of my extra inside arc shapes onto a corner of the batting and backing for my test piece.

The tension on the Brother Dreamweaver XE is easily adjusted on the LCD screen. Just press the up arrow to increase top tension or the down arrow to decrease top tension.

When adjusting tension on your machine you want to change the top tension until the back of your quilt looks like the line indicated by the green arrow.

The blue arrow shows the quilting stitches that were sewn when the top tension was too low. I adjusted my tension from 4 to 7.2 to get the correct tension for my thread (rayon on top, cotton in bobbin), fabric and batting combination.

Don’t worry about what the number on your top tension reads – just keep adjusting until your stitches look good on the top AND bottom.

The red markings on the dual feed foot were handy for guiding my quilting stitches so that they were an even width away from the seams.

I stitched quilting lines down either side of each pieced arc section.

Make sure to always reinforce your stitches at the beginning and end of each quilting line.

Since I’m quilting using stitch “Q-01” which is one of the quilting stitches, the Dreamweaver XE automatically reinforces the stitches when you begin to sew. At the end of my quilting line I just have to press the reinforcement stitch button and the machine stitches reinforcement stitches, cuts the threads AND raises the foot!

The guideline marker on the Dreamweaver XE can be used to quilt a straight line from one point of the inside arc to the other.

I used both straight lines and curved lines to quilt the center of each block.

The quilting of the table topper was done entirely using the dual feet food on the Brother Dreamweaver XE.

I just used scissors (and a steady hand LOL) to trim the excess backing and batting from the quilted table topper.

Once you’ve got the whole table topper is trimmed, the outside perimeter of one-quarter of it can be measured using a measuring tape. Now just multiply this number by 4 and add about 10 inches to find the length of bias binding you’ll need.

My table topper will need about 122″ of binding (28″ x 4 + 10″).

I love how my table topper looks now that it’s all quilted. One more step to go until it’s all finished!

Join me tomorrow for the magic and math, I’ll use a super easy way to make bias binding, then sew it on using the Dreamweaver XE. See you then!