Treadle Quilts: SQUIRREL and Jacquie Gering walking foot class

In September, I was able to take a class with Jacquie Gering on quilting with the walking foot. Her book, "Walk" has great ideas and tips, but actually doing the quilting under her watchful eye is really helpful. We had an enjoyable day trying out different techniques and making samples of many designs.

I took my older vintage Bernina 830 along and it worked very well with only a little wrinkling. I could not figure out how to reduce the pressure on the presser foot on this machine. When I got home, I thought it would be fun to try a little quilting on a few small pieces.

My friend, Mary Lou and I love to get each other sidetracked with new projects all the time. Everytime we come up with a new idea, we will email it to each other with Squirrel in the subject line. The friendly competition has resulted in both of us getting into squirrel mode and starting a new project before all our other ones are finished!

In our small quilt guild, we make quilts for our local hospital's chemo unit. We received a donation from someone with 2332 squares that are 1"! Our President challenged us to make a quilt with at least that many squares. She was sort of joking, but 15 of us jumped right in to try that. Mary Lou was NOT going to do that! Too time consuming. I kept bugging her and sending her fun pictures of beautiful quilts made with 1" squares. And, then one day, she told me she had found some 1 1/2" strips in her stash and started sewing them together "just to see how long it would take" LOL. Before long she had a top done and quilted! She is now working on her second one!

I was shopping with a friend of mine and we were teasing each other about all the 'squirrels' we were tempted with when the shop owner asked why we kept saying "squirrel". We explained that it's like taking your dog for a walk and how he darts off when he sees a squirrel. "Oh" she said, "Have you seen the panel in the sale bin?" The squirrels on this panel were so adorable and for $5.00, who could resist that? I immediately thought of Mary Lou and when I got home, found a bunch of 1 1/2" strips in my stash that matched one of the squirrels in the panel and stitched a border around it.

I decided to try quilting it with the walking foot as Jacquie had instructed. I drew a wavy line from corner to corner going both ways and got about halfway finished when I took a good look at it and realized it was very very crooked. Here you can see how crooked it was! (click on the photos for a larger view)

the very crooked quilting!

I could not live with this! I picked all the stitching out again and basted it carefully. Meanwhile, I mentioned to my husband that I couldn't understand why you couldn't loosen the pressure on these machines. He told me that you could! Wow, I've only owned this machine for 20 or so years and now finally find that out! He helped me loosen the pressure a lot and I re-quilted it...much better!