Quilting Without Special Attachments

Here's the last update on my mom's tranquility quilt, because it's COMPLETE, hah!

I struggled with the question of how to quilt this quilt since my mother doesn't have any special foot attachments for her machine and they were either not available or insanely expensive.

I had some great tips from you, my readers and it turns out that stippling doesn't really require a quilting foot, hooray!

It worked pretty well - the only issue is of course that the regular foot doesn't have a spring to move it down when the needle moves down - thus, as I pull the fabric around, the needle is repeatedly bent.

This needle didn't survive that process and broke...


I'm always so greateful that the needle tip is attached to fabric and can't jump up into my face at full speed!

The second needle made it through the rest of the quilt, and I tried to go a bit more slowly, as well.

The second question was thread colour. I hadn't considered in my colour advice for my mother, that a dark blue side combined with a white side makes thread choice tricky.

a) using two matching threads has two problems: 1) dark thread is heavier because of the dye in it, therefore tension problems are common. And 2) with the problems we had with tension during piecing, it was clear that both threads would be seen on both sides at some point along the quilting line.

b) I had bought a ton of invisible thread - and I hope I can return it. It's horrible stuff!
Well, I'll give it another chance on my machine at home, but the tension was off the board (I had loops of about 3 cm length on EVERY stitch on the underside. Also, the stuff feels aweful compared to nice cotton thread.

Do you guys have experience using invisble thread? Do I have to do something different with it compare to cotton?

Anyway, we ended up using white and blue thread and in the next post, I'll show you the results!