Hey everybody, it’s Rob from Man Sewing. And today’s tutorial is going to be another
one of those great ideas on what to do with some of your favorite fabrics that you’re
not necessarily going to quilt with. Here’s one of my examples up here. Now framed fiber
art, I call this. This is a great old day of the dead fabric from Alexander Henry fabrics.
Please don’t ask me for it. It don’t think it’s available anymore and you can’t have
mine. I have all of the colors and all of the motifs. I just love that stuff. But I
also wanted to just display it. So I found that terrific old frame. And I thought the
fabric matched nicely. And so that’s one of the kicks I get is kind of matching that
stuff together. And I also when I travel around, I love to look in those old knick knack stores
or junk stores for old frames and like old instruments and stuff. Now one of the tips
is make sure you’re not paying any extra for all the dust that builds up on the glass.
It’s not padding. You don’t need to spend extra on that. But like this frame here, I
think I might have spent a buck or two on it. I’m sure. Now when you’re doing this
kind of stuff, you can leave the glass in. You can take the glass out. It really depends
on what your intended look is. So what I want to show you is how I’m going to do some
free motion machine quilting just a little bit of embellishing. And what I’ve chosen
here is this really cool fabric from Michael Miller. I chose it specifically because it
has some negative space. If you really like tight free motion machine quilting, you can
do a lot of your intricate work in that negative space. But you can also just trace around
the edging. And not only does the tracing around the edging with a different color of
thread actually adds some character to the fabric itself but it adds that quilting texture
or that loft to the fabric. And that’s when you may decide to take the glass actually
out of the frame if you want. So like I said, there’s a lot of different ways to approach
this. But let me walk you through how I’m going to do the actual stitching here. I’m
going to have to set this down because I’ll knock it over, ok?
Now for something like this, just about any kind of batting or maybe even that cool new
bosal foam would also work. But what I’ve done here is I have two layers of the cotton
batting. This was just scrap laying around. You can see I brought some extra threads with
me today, right? And the reason I have two is the more layers of batting the more loft
you get out of your free motion machine quilting. Oh I should also point out, I don’t have
any backing fabric on here. Now when I’m doing free motion machine quilting some machines
you really are better off with a backing on here. The backing is not a problem but it
might make it a little thick inside of your frame. But that’s probably more information
than you even needed to know.
So if you have never free motion machine quilted before, wow! This is really a great place
to start and practice. You really can’t go wrong. But just to give you some rundown.
We have our feed dogs in the down position. They’re not going to come up. I am in charge
of all of my stitch length, all of my stitch width. I am basically just going to move the
fabric under the needle, ok? I’m using a cotton thread. And I’m using a fairly fine
needle like a sharps 80 or a sharps 70 would be my preferred choice here.
Now one of the things if you haven’t done much free motion machine quilting let’s
just give you a little starting point or a little tip here. I’m going to grab my top
thread and I’m going to drop my needle down. Oop, first I’m going to drop my presser
foot. Oh and that’s a really good thing to point out, with the free motion presser
foot, it’s kind of a hopping foot. And it’s really hard to see as you just saw me do,
to tell if the foot is up or down. So make sure your foot is down so when your foot is
down, your tension is locked into your machine. And you’re going to have a fantastic start
here. So now I’m just taking a couple of stitches to lock my thread in and I am going
to literally just follow this line. Try to stay close. And of course I’ve decided to get a little rowdy. I’m using purple
thread on blue and white fabric so I probably better do a little better job. So I’m just
going to come through here. Now with free motion quilting, they say that you want to
try to keep your stitch length consistent. One of the tricks I’ve learned about that
is I’m actually listening and feeling the machine. I’m not looking at the stitch length
but I’m getting that rhythm. And within that rhythm, you’re also going to be working
within, what do I want to say, the vibration of the machine and you’re moving your hands
with the rhythm of the needle. So if your hands are going slow your machine should be
going slow. If your hand is going fast, your machine should be going fast.
But the first step is I’m just going to quilt or stitch all the way around this little
frame of the design. Not the frame that we have going over there, ok? Now so that you
don’t have to wait for me to get all the way around the edge. One of the other things
you can do and the less starts and stops you do with your free motion quilting, the less
chance of the thread coming loose and unknotting and things. So let’s say you wanted to do
some of that intricate style stitching now, I’ve come halfway up. Now I’m going to
work my way, let’s say we’re doing little circles or something. So I’m going to do
some little circles around here. The key to circles is complete every circle. Come around
and now I’m near the little stem, I hope you can see that ok. We’ve got some cool
new cameras here. And I’m running around the stem to give it some new art or some new
texture in here. And I’m just going to play and I’m going to play and I’m going to
play until I like the way it finishes. Once it’s done, all I have to do at that point
is pop the backing out of my frame and the backing becomes my measuring device, right?
So I’m going to lay that on my free motion quilted sample. You’re going to want to
make sure you keep it centered if it is a symmetrical motif like I was using. Cut it,
lay it in with the stitching pointing out of course. And you can put your backing on
it. And another fun way you can do this, and I’ll actually show you how to cut it, it’s
pretty easy.
Look at this, I was just testing some threads here. This is a fun new variegated polyester
thread of all things from Orofil and they have a couple different colors out there that
I really like. But I am pretty fond of this portion of my design, ok? So let’s say we’re
going to really need to do this and I don’t want to take this apart because I’ve got
a couple of nails holding it all together that you can’t see. But what I can easily
do is just come here and measure. Ok, so I need an eight by ten cut. So let’s take
a nice big long cut over here. And literally this was a practice sample. No I liked it
so that was hard for me to do, ok? And then I’m just going to come down here and we’re
making eight this way. And it doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate because it’s going
to be inside of a frame, right? And I’m going to trim this down. I am making sure
though that I have my total ten inches. Yes I do. Ok, there’s that. And then there’s
that. And then sometimes having a little bit of extra loft adds some, some fun to it. Maybe
I just decided I didn’t like that section as much, I could always go back in there and
free motion quilt it some more. But when that’s all done, I would have popped the back off
if I got that rusty old nail out of the way. And you can drop it in this way. Or the other
cool thing, I’m going to put my thumb there so you don’t see the knot I made. It’s
sometimes the bobbin thread looks as great as the front side and don’t forget you can
always use those cool variegated threads in the bobbin as well.
Now as I said, you can stick just about anything in a frame, but I’m a fiber artist so I
love sticking my fiber art in frames. You can use them for decorations anywhere and
they also make a fantastic gift. That’s right my birthday is in December so we’ve
got birthday and Christmas coming up eventually so don’t forget, I love gifts and I love
all of you. We’ll see you next time at Man Sewing.