Line Quilting

My home-made sewing guide

Almost all of the quilting I've done has been stitch-in-the-ditch or outlining.  I've tried stippling once or twice, but I haven't spent the hours I'd need to practice to master it on my old Singer.  It's the piecing I love to do, and I've kept the quilting to the bare minimum to tack everything down.

Once again, the Blogger's Quilt Festival is inspiring me to try new things.  I saw that some of the neatest quilts in last fall's show had simple quilting - spirals or straight lines.  I really like the effects and all of them were basically straight-line stitching.  I decided to quilt radiating squares on my current quilting project.

This type of quilting requires a guide when stitching lines more than 1/4" apart and the seam guide that comes with this machine screws into the bottom plate of the sewing machine.  Obviously that wasn't going to work.  I use a walking foot for quilting and all of the foot-based sewing guides I found required buying a new walking foot.  In the end I decided I could make a guide for my existing foot using a wine cork, some coat hanger wire and duct tape.  Nothing says DIY like duct tape.  It's not pretty (although I like the hot-pink tape) and it needs a little work (I need to find a glue that sticks), but so far it's doing the trick.

I need some more practice to keep my lines straight.  However, the current project looks pretty cool and no one but me will notice inconsistencies.  I can't wait to show off the finished quilt!