What’s that you say? A practice sandwich?
Yes, that’s right. You need a sandwich of fabric, batting and backing so that you can practice new machine quilting ideas, warm up your muscles and your memory, and try out all kinds of stitches before you put them on your quilt.
My oft-used practice sandwich is covered with practice stitching.
Some amount of time always passes between one machine quilting session and the next for me, and unless you quilt full time for a living, you’re probably the same. We get a little rusty in that time, whether it’s a few days or a few months. The longer between projects, the more rusty we are.
It only takes a few minutes of warmup time on your practice sandwich to get your muscle memory back in gear, and it’s time well spent. But machine quilting isn’t the only thing you can use a practice sandwich for. Look down the left-hand side of the photo above. I also use my sandwich to see how decorative stitches look. Sometimes they’re just what I am after, and sometimes I need to try a couple to find one that works.
In this image, I wanted to see whether I could quilt feathers along a tight curve, so I drew it with a marker and gave it a go. This is the back side of the same sandwich pictured above.
On the shot above, you can see that I had tension issues. It’s good to discover this on your sandwich, and not on your quilt.
Since that sandwich was looking pretty scraggly, I thought it was time for a new one. I picked two fat quarters I didn’t have plans for, layered them up with a scrap of batting, and started in.
I warmed up a little with some jigsaw puzzle quilting, and then I tested my serpentine stitch. I had a quilt border I wanted to quilt with the serpentine, and I needed to get the size just right.
This is the back side of the new sandwich. I put the fabric right side down to make it a little less intense. You want to be able to see the practice stitches clearly, and that’s easier on a less busy print.
Once again, I discovered that I needed to adjust the tension and slow down a little on the curves. Once I remedied those issues, I got along just fine.
I was working on the HQ Stitch 710, but these principles apply to any machine.
Make yourself a practice sandwich today!
(And hold the mustard.)
What causes the batting to come thru to back on stitches? No, no change of threads or Needles where this has happened.. help
I don’t know the technical reason this happens, but I do know that some batting is prone to this problem, which is known as “bearding.” My solution has been to find a couple of batts that work well for me and then to stick with them. I buy them on the bolt or in king-size sheets.
Nice article on the machines. Maybe you could do a post on exactly how you handled the tension problems…all of the steps you take to correct problems. Are there videos on using the HQ Stitch machines? If so a link to them would be helpful. Looking forward to seeing more posts.
Yes, as do I.. I do quilts for folks, never had this problem before, and 2/3 Rds of this quilt were beautiful… I am taking all stitches out & starting with different everything..
Thx, Carol