I decided to just embrace it...

Yesterday was Free motion quilting day for me. I must admit I was stressed. Also, I broke two needles, still don't really know why, but i started experimenting with the tensions and apparently it all worked out.

I think the stress comes from wanting to do a good job, also quilting on the actual quilt is stressfull, I was so afraid to ruin it. At first there was a lot of frustration because what I was doing was not similar at all to some of the lovely work I see on all the blogs I visit daily. Also some arm ache.

But then I just decided to embrace the "free" aspect of it all, and decided to go with it.
The only thing I tried to do was keep it all round and even (not a complete sucess on either part). In the end, it was my very first free motion quilt, before that I had only tried doing this on scraps, it's completely diferent to manage a quilt, even if it is a lap quilt, it's still 40" by 60" or something similar to that.

I tried with gloves and without them (it's so much easier with them) I tried keeping my hands flat and I tried grabing the fabric and ended up with grabing on one end and straightening the quilt with the other so I can see where I was going, I find that if I grab on both sides I lose control.
I tried all speeds and even though a medium speed is more confortable for me, the top speed makes for a better result. Also I kept forgeting to push the presser foot down and so i had to redo the work loads of times. But I'm wiser for it. I hope ;)

The busy front

The back with the hexies

Originally I thought I would quilt around the hexies, but then I realised it would look weird on the front to have that inexplicable unquilted line. And this way, the hexies become much more a part of the quilt, not just apliqueed hexies. This was also an opportunity to enjoy the amazing abilities of my sewing machine. Even with all this fabric it didn't even slow down. Even when I got to the hexies, there were like 5 layers of fabric, because I decided not to trim the hexies because I like them to be bulky but in a good way.

Still, in my amazing ability to complicate the simple, I still thought I had ruined the machine on several ocasions. First, i've already mentioned the needles breaking, which is all very new to me.
Secondly, by the time I finished the quilting, I still had some energy in me to start on the binding, so I decided to sew the strips together. But when I did that the thread would get caught on the bobin holder., this hapened a couple of times. So decided to get "under the hood" also a very dangerous task for me. There was some lint, more than I thought there would be considering I've only had it for a week. Oh, and I also opened the top of the machine to clean the threads that had been left by the previous thread I tried quilting with, as I mentioned.
So anyway, after cleaning I was still geting the same results. So I tried taking the thread out and the fabric out and try a diferent thread on a diferent fabric and THEN I remembered the dog feet were down... And THEN I noticed my stich lenght was in zero... Also, since I changed everything I'm not sure what  exactly did that, but then it started working, and by the time I got back to the fabric and the thread I intended to use, everything was ok at last and so for today we have binding on the menu!

The purple worked so well on the last quilt, I'm going to use it again on this one. I just know she is going to love it :)