Wednesday, October 2, 2013

How to adapt a 1/4" quilting foot



My 1/4" quilting foot arrived. But, it did work on my machine ~ an old Bernette 330. It snapped on, just like any other foot, but my machine kept unthreading while it was on (yep, I was using good thread). After some observing it while it was unthreading, I noticed the needle slightly hit the back of the  foot, but not enough to make a noise or break the needle. Determined to make it work, I used  dremel type tool to make the hole in the foot larger. It now works! How did I ever survive without one of these feet? It's SO much easier to get even seams with this foot. Guess my old Bernette is too old to have too many new feet.




I finished piecing the top, but still need to add borders. The pattern calls for just one border, but I might add another one. 

While using the jelly roll, some of the pieces were cut off pattern. This one shows the brown/ecru print. I used the 1/4" seam, but the fabric print is over 1/2" off from one side to another. There's not enough leftover fabric to use, so I'm just going to have to leave it as is. I think for any patterned fabric I will use my own cut fabric so that I can be cut on grain/pattern in the future.

I'm keeping mental notes of things that would be nice in a new machine. One is the quilting foot. But, my machine gets stuck when going from 2 layers of fabric to 6 (when going over seams). It would be nice to get one of the feet that combines the 1/4" seams with an even feed. I didn't even know they made them, until I wanted to combine the 2 feet that I have. I started looking at machine accys online, and found they make what I wanted.

The next decision will be to machine quilt or hand quilt. I am not an expert at the free motion machine quilting. I love to look of hand quilting, but don't know what pattern to quilt. I think I'll hit the library for some books for ideas.

~*~ Laura ~*~

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