in this video i'm going to show you how to do hearts and meanders free motion quilting
and it's much much easier than it looks i promise. We're going to be free motion
quilting some hearts and some meanders so if you've watched a couple of my videos
these last two weeks i've been showing you how to stipple stitch and i've been showing you how to
meander now we're going to include some hearts in that and i am going to use this tool also
which is a friction pen it comes away with heat so if you're a beginner to free motion quilting
this is going to be a really useful tip for you some people recommend that you practice
on paper like you draw them on paper i would actually recommend that you actually just
practice on the machine and i recommend that you do it this way that i'm going to
show you right now i am literally going to draw hearts in random places on my placemat
and i'm gonna do tails that come off either side like so now you can say this is cheating
but i really don't think it is cheating i actually think it's a great way
of anchoring that movement into your memory so basically i'm going to do hearts all over my
placemat like this and i'm going to do them upside down i'm going to do them to the left i'm
just going to do them to right and basically i'm going to leave gaps so we can go and do a meander
and then when we join up to this particular line we can just do our heart and then move on
so here we go these are the hearts that i'm going to be free motion quilting what
you think is this cheating i don't think it's cheating that's my personal opinion so let's go
over to the sewing machine i am over at the babylock soprano this is my sewing machine
i always do all my sewing tutorials on, i'm not paid nor sponsored to create this video
so i have placed some glide thread in the top of my sewing machine i generally always use glide
i am going to attach my open toe foot for free motion quilting work on to my sewing machine and
just a reminder that your sewing needles need to be changed out after eight hours of work on your
sewing machine so maybe time to change your needle if you haven't done that for a while
there we go we are all threaded
whenever we do free motion quilting work we have to drop the feed dog so we'll take this off and
at the back of the machine is this slide so you just move it and it drops the feed dogs
so i'm basically starting right from the edge of my border here and i'm going to start by
doing a simple meander so i'm just weaving in and out like a little river like if you
watched one of my meander videos that i'm going to explain how to do that and basically what i'm
going to do is i'm going to squiggle right up to one of these first hearts that i drew
like so and then i'm just gonna follow along my drawing line now it doesn't have to be
perfect just make sure that it obviously looks like a heart and then we're just going to do a
meander and we're going to find our next heart which is over here so i'm just going to do that
and i'm going to join up to this line and i'm going to draw my heart
and i'm just going to do a meander
just want to make sure that i fill
all the empty spaces up so you see how simple that is so i'm just going to meander all
the way in here and i'm going to find my line and i'm going to draw my next heart
you may find that you only have to do a few of these drawn on
to feel the motion of what it's like to draw an actual heart so just do some more meanders
join up with that next line and if you have to move your fabric just move your fabric around
and then draw the next heart
have you seen how easy that is especially for free motion quilting so just keep going
free motion quilting isn't difficult the only thing is it's difficult with
free motion quilting is the fact that you need to understand the movement of
how to draw something so i mean it does work when you're practicing on paper but when
you're actually physically doing it when you're actually using the sewing machine
it feels totally different when you free motion quilting so i find it's better to learn this
way than it is just to do it on a piece of paper because you need to understand like how you need
to move this fabric around how to place your hands and everything so let's draw some more hearts
and then fill it in with the meanders
so what do you think do you think this will actually make it easier for you
in order to practice your free motion quilting let me know in that comment box down below
and i'm just going to keep going i'm going to fill this all in and i'm going to let you see what it
looks like at the end so here we go now we see all the green marks i'm going to put my iron on it
and they're all going to disappear
so that just leaves us with our free motion quilting and our stitching
so some people say that this pen marking will come back in negative weather so i've got the
perfect weather to test this out today because we are negative 20. so later on i'm going to test
whether this really does come back in really cold environments so i just wanted to see what this
looks like up close see you would never know that i used anything to let's just say cheat my way
through free motion quilting but i really don't think it's cheating why not use the tools that
we have in order to make life much more easier so this is a heart meander free motion quilting
okay so outside this door right now it's -20 so i'm going to see
if this pen mark comes back in minus 20 let's find out
so i need to let you know that it was out there for a good five minutes in
negative 20 minus 20 degrees weather and none of that pen mark came back so i mean
it needs to be seriously cold for that pen to come back
i hope after watching this video you feel much more confident in free motion quilting don't
forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss my next video thank you for watching bye guys