Quilting

Sometimes I look at other people's blogs and feel jealous of their fabulous crafting environment with quilting walls, huge tables and special built in wardrobes. Admittedly this tends to be people who craft for a living rather than a hobby, but still, it's difficult not to wish that we had room for an extension to our small South London maisonette. This week I took two days off and the weather was gorgeous so I moved my sewing machine from the kitchen table to the garden and was completely cured of my jealousy because, as far as I'm concerned, nothing could be nicer.




After my intensive spell of working it has been lovely to have a holiday. I decided to carry on working on my sunrise quilt and decided to add three borders to finish off the patchwork.



The next step is to layer the quilt with the patchwork on top, wadding in the middle and a backing fabric and then quilt the layers together. To attempt to make the quilting easier I bought an 'even walking foot'. This is a cumbersome looking sewing machine foot which feeds the fabric though from the top at the same rate that the feed dogs feed through the fabric at the bottom. I was petty flummoxed as to how to fit the foot to my Janome DC3050 until I found a fantastic post and a fabulous diagram from Hoppo Bumpo.

I took some photos of the process in case anyone else has the same difficulty as me:
1. Remove the foot holder


2. Prop the foot handle over the needle clamp


3. Screw in the foot


I quilted a test piece of patchwork and was very impressed with the new foot:


From the back:


So the next step will be to attempt the same thing with my much larger sunrise quilt.