The trick to amazing free motion quilting for beginners

It’s my last post of the week and also of the year featuring the PFAFF creative icon. And I have just the right post for it! I’ll show you how you can make your free-motion quilting look amazing!

All week I’ve shown you how to create projects using curved blocks. In yesterday’s post, I made a heart shape square for Valentine’s Day. And I have just the right quilting method to make it look fabulous.

Once again, my PFAFF creative icon made it easy for me to quilt the block. Since this is my last blog posts of the year, I will summarize all the things that simply amazed me on this machine throughout the year when quilting:

• Huge workspace
• Perfect lighting
• Ease to refill bobbin through the needle so that I didn’t have to unthread
• Bobbins are designed to hold 30% more thread
• Telescopic thread guide (a real help with the invisible threads)
• Able to place large spools directly on the machine
• Self-threading needle (has never let me down once this year)
• Cut off thread button
• Tie off thread button
• Knee lift for presser foot (thought I would hate it, but couldn’t live without it now)
• Big screen to help set up quilting design
• Download apps on your smartphone and tablets keeps your informed of the embroidery status when you need to leave the room
• MySewnet™ I cloud that lets you save your embroidery designs
• The ¼” foot with the IDT™ system and straight stitch needle plate allowed me to quilt straight lines perfectly and also have a perfect stitch in the ditch
• The Dynamic spring foot 6D for free-motion quilting and embroidering
• Three hoop size for better embroidery designs

Now for the heart quilt block, I decided to finish it off as a pillow. There are so many ideas running through my head, you wouldn’t believe. If you review my October post on embroidering text, you will see how easy it would be to embroider Love or hug time or XOXO somewhere in all the negative space. You could even embroider a name in the heart. So many options!

But since I’ve already done that, I wanted to try something I haven’t this year: free motion quilting.  And I can hear you saying: Oh no! I don’t want to… I’m not good at that! So here’s where the PFAFF creative icon can help us perfect free motion quilting.

First I started with a simple straight stitch to set my top on the batting and backing. I stitched in the ditch around the heart and in the borders so that there would be no distortion when quilting. Then I went and picked two embroidery designs that are in the PFAFF quilting section and positioned them in key locations on the project: 3 in the heart and 2 in the negative space below the heart.

The precise positioning tools really helped me ensure that I was placing my embroideries correctly and I also positioned the block using the notch on the hoop to ensure that it was well centered.

Of course, the creative icon worked its magic in no time, making beautiful quilting designs using the Sulky Rayon Variables 30wt thread in Vari-Reds. The thread added pizzazz immediately.

Now that these designs are finished, I simply had to fill in the rest of the space with my free motion quilting. Once I had exited the embroidery section and went back to regular sewing mode, I clicked the free motion button on the screen and the machine automatically lowered the feed dogs.

All I had to do is put on my quilting gloves and start my free motion quilting around the heart while trying to mimic the embroidery design already in place. Trust me! You can’t do harm as everyone else will see how perfect the embroidered pieces are and not really look at the rest.

Give it a try starting with a small surface! Make it a part of your new year’s resolution to perfect your quilting throughout 2019. I know it’s one of my goals using the PFAFF creative icon, after all, perfection starts here!