This is the mini quilt I'll be donating to our Guild's fund-raising auction for the Children's Craniofacial Foundation. I'm calling it "Love Birds." It's my first effort at free motion quilting, and after the first hour of frustration in dealing with breaking thread, tension wrong, etc., I started to get the hang of it. (I have a Pfaff quilt expressions 4.0). I finally switched to an Aurifil top thread, and followed some advice to change the stitch length to zero, and last night I had much less thread breakage. This is very, very random free motion quilting, in that these swirls are not in neat and tidy rows but just fitted into the spaces very randomly. It was hard at first not to want to turn the fabric with each change in direction, as if I were stitching with a pressure foot, and each time I stopped and started again, it took awhile to get into the "zone." But when I get going it is hard to stop! I still need to bind this thing and do a little more stitching on the birds and the hearts so the density is somewhat more uniform.
I ran across an on-line tutorial for free motion quilting (kind of a pattern a week) that I may have to sign up for (the tutorials are free, but she has a kit with directions and patterns that can be ordered). I'm hooked. (all I need - a new addiction!).
