I made the mistake of thinking it would be easy to set my sewing machine up for free motion quilting…

Turns out the footer I needed wasn’t even available locally (I did at least have the sense to check online and realized this before I went out shopping (not that a trip to JoAnne Fabric would have been a complete waste). But that’s what Amazon is for. I checked the Janome site, found the part I needed and it was here in 2 days.

The package had three different feet and a feed dog cover and easy instructions to follow on how to put the new footer assembly on and I was able to switch it out quite easily:

So then I just needed to disengage my feed dogs, which looked simple enough after looking at my user manual. Ha! The inside of my machine looked nothing like the user manual diagram. But the package I got from Amazon came with a feed dog cover that clipped over the feed dogs and all the instructions I’ve been reading/watching online say to disengage or cover your feed dogs so I figured I’d give it a try with just the cover on. Ha!

The idea behind free motion quilting is that the feed dogs that normally advance the fabric forward are disengaged or covered so that you can move the fabric manually to control the motion of the sewing.

So what happens when you try to free motion quilt without your feed dogs properly disengaged? You jam up your bobbin real good. It’s also a really great method for perforating paper! So I did what I normally do when I get really frustrated with my sewing machine (after swearing profusely at it) I vacuumed and did laundry.

I have found a ridiculous number of videos online showing how to disengage feed dogs, for seemingly every sewing machine on the Earth except mine. I’m going to give up and ask Paul to take a look (I hate to be such a stereotype but he is an engineer and he is much better at swearing at inanimate objects than I am).

The photos are back from Jay!

“Black Tie” Encaustic monotypes, batting, interfacing, thread on alumininum, 12″ x 12″ (photo credit Jay York)

See what I mean about him doing such a better job of photographing? I had a hard time deciding how to finish this one – decided to mount it on an aluminum panel I had handy to give it some more definition and contrast. While I was at it I had him photograph the last three quilts that I finished. I’ll add those to the next couple of posts.