Machine Quilting?

[katmg]

Does anyone know anything about machine quilting? I'm about 2/3 of the way through hand quilting a queen sized quilt. It has taken me 4 years (*not continuously*) to get to that point and I'd really like to just be finished with the darn thing.

I have a sewing machine and tried to use it to finish up the rest of the quilting but it didn't really work as planned. Is there any way that I can use my regular sewing machine (Brother XR-40) to finish this darn thing? The stitch length had problems - I think I was doing something wrong feeding it into the machine.

Anyone??

[Smillow]

Machine quilting & hand quilting are going to look different!
My Brother Machine cs-8150 has a hand quilting stich that looks like this=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=
For the stich length & tension - work on a small sample "quilt" - it will be tricky to manage a queen size quilt through the machine opening.
I have found that I like using a thicker thread when quilting with the decorative stich functions on my machine (not that I have done much quilting on my yet to be completed quilt tops). I have mostly worked on "sample" squares. The sulky blendables thread is a nice weight: 12 weight. I have not found this weight in a solid color thread however.
Good luck!

[Heidi]

This may or may not be helpful, but here it is anyway.

I have made several quilts in the past 7-8 years. I always used to tie them, because no matter how much I love the look of quilting, I did not have the time to do it by hand, and my machine could not handle it because the opening is not big enough, as was mentioned in PP.

This summer I made a queen size quilt as a gift and took it to a professional to have quilted. It looks beautiful, and I loved it. It was so worth it! It took about 2 days for her to finish and it cost me about $185 which included the batting, putting the binding on, and the quilting itself. I just dropped off another quilt yesterday that will be a Christmas gift.

Sometimes I feel like this is cheating, to not finish my own quilts. But I justify it by saying that since I do not have the room in my sewing area to do this and make it look great, it is worth it to pay someone with the equipment, space, expertise and experience.

Perhaps you could look into this option?

[katmg]

Heidi - I thought about taking it somewhere to have it finished, but with it being over 2/3rds of the way done, I'm not sure if someone would be willing to. I know the machine/hand quilting will never look the same, so I'm not sure the person doing the machine quilting would feel comfortable completing it. If I ever make another quilt top I will DEFINITELY send it out to be finished!

I think at this point I just have to finish hand quilting it. There's not that much left to go. I think there are 27 more lines to quilt - if I do 3 lines a night I can be finished in 9 days!