OmniStitch for FreeMotion

Quilting has been taking up much of my time, if not actually sewing at least in my head. I love the design process, learning new skills, practicing until I can get it right (or at least better but who am I kidding, at least until it can be shown in public), along with the best sewing machine for this new skill. After piecing the top of a quilt I'm somewhat at a loss for how to actually quilt the top, batting, and backing together. Trying to stitch-in-the-ditch or outline blocks has been my past efforts but sometimes I long for the longarm machine quilt finish. My sister had one and did up a huge king size quilt of mine that I use for a bedspread but she lives in Michigan and has since sold her machine. I have looked into having a service or individual do up my quilts but it's pretty pricey. Here's what I have tried with some success.

Quilting Frame

Parts of a quilt frame

What started me down the road to free motion quilting was watching a video where they used a frame to keep the quilt taunt and for ease of manipulation. Even though the video used a Flynn Frame and I wasn't going to spend $150 on one, I did find a frame at a thrift store and for $10 I figured I could try to use it in some fashion. Well, it was "some fashion" and I found out the limitations and parts I must be missing. I needed some other parts to keep rolling up the quilt as I finished but it did show me how it could work.


OmniStitch

OmniStitch OS-1000

The sewing machine that I figured out would be the best for this kind of work is a no-feed dog type, meant for embellishing items with yarn or ribbon. It came to me via a thrift store for under $10 and I have only spent money on DBx1 needles so it was worth the experimentation. Mine came with only one attachment for feeding the yarn/ribbon so that wasn't going to work too well but I could use it for free motion.

No feed dogs, just a single needle opening

 This has worked for me before so I got it all set up with the quilting frame to discover I needed to remove the presser foot and needle to get the frame under the arm. This was a pain but maybe I would only need to do this a few times. I started to quilt on a simple block pieced baby quilt made of flannel, something I got at the River Rats TOGA last fall. I have three of these quilt tops and one came with backing fabric so that's where I started. Adding one layer of batting and getting it all into the frame, I was ready to stitch. I decided to try out a different design in each square to make this a sampler in free motion quilting and this turned out to be a good idea. The frame only allowed me to go about 6 inches into the quilt before I needed to roll it up and that was the part that was missing. I took a stab at trying to use it with another bar to hold the unquilted pieces together but it finally sorta collapsed so I took it out from under the arm of the machine.

Now I was up for the real deal, free motion just holding the quilt layers in place as I went. Thank goodness it was flannel because they really stuck together well even without basting! It was fun to try out different free motion patterns to see what worked, what was too much work, and how to control the speed and movement to get a good result. Here's my first attempt:

Flannel baby quilt with different patterns in each block

I ended up using some left over rayon blanket binding just to get it finished off since it was not going to be sold or even given away: it was for practice only. Next up I tried another one and this time I decided to use a wave and circle pattern at random to stitch in an all over pattern. I was surprised how little time it took, maybe over an hour for a 32" by 40" size baby quilt. Using safety pins to hold things together, I started in the center and moved out, smoothing and removing pins as I went. No basting! Here's how it looked:

All over stitch pattern

and then with green blanket binding with an ombre look of a light to dark fading out of the color:

Almost done with the second of three baby quilts in flannel

 I'm getting better so I'm ready to start the third flannel quilt top with a blue flannel backing:

Blue backing on pieced blocks

This has been a good learning time and I'm glad to have the pieced tops already presented so all I needed was to do the finishing up by learning free motion quilting. I sure didn't want to experiment on something I spend hours and hours on cutting, piecing, plus the cost of the fabric only to then botch the free motion quilting. Do I feel ready to work on one of my "dream" quilts? Not yet, but I have several sets of quilt blocks from the TOGA and others I can still practice on before I put the needle to a fancy quilt top. It's all about practice, practice,and more practice!