Walking Foot Quilting

I began quilting my star pillow cover with light colored thread and a fancy design.  Three hours of quilting and it looked awful.  Three more hours to pick it all out listening to a good audiobook.  OK.  Now what?  Clearly fancy, special quilting was not doing anything for the pillow cover.  Neither was the light colored thread.

TIP:  Sometimes fancy quilting is not the best way to quilt.

Fancy quilting is so beautiful on negative space.  It is stunning on a whole cloth quilt.  It doesn't work so well on fabrics with a busy design.

I threw my hands up and decided I didn't want to spend inordinate amounts of time on this project so I dug out my dual feed foot.  If you don't have one of those, a walking foot will do the same thing.  I have read that people do 1/4 inch lines with these feet, but on my foot the front tips curl up and I didn't think I would be able to gauge it right with my eyes since the tips are not flat on the fabric.  However, a red line runs down the foot 1/4 inch from the needle so I decided to give it a try.  Awesome!  It works.  My eyes adjusted to the spatial variation with no problem.  I didn't have to mark anything.

See how the tips curl up.  See the red guidelines.

I did yards and yards of straight-line, perfect quarter inch stitching, and do you know what?  It looks great.  It didn't even take very long. There is texture around the star, but it accentuates the star instead of fighting with it.   You don't want to fight with the stars!  (Scroll down to last week's post to see the whole block.)

Finished quilting
(pardon the fuzz - I was stuffing a puppy toy at photo time)

Sew some happy seams this week.  I wish you a trial with your special feet.  They can be fun.