Free Motion Again

I've been working on my Coins quilt the last few days. I got it sandwiched, and I've been ditching it using a walking foot. I've taken a bunch of classes on Craftsy on quilting by machine. Some of the teachers teach using a walking foot, some teach ditching as you go using free motion. This particular quilt has lots of long straight lines and doesn't have blocks. I think the walking foot was the way to go here.

I decided to use thread that would show. I was a little worried about the ditching, but in the photo you almost can't tell it is there. The background fabric is white on white. I'm using a color that is darker than the darkest shade in the fabric, and I think it works pretty well.

I started with a pattern I'm pretty comfortable with, a version of leaves. My intention is to have the patterns run into one another. I did that with one ring on a practice piece I was doing recently, and really liked the look. So the next pattern will be a smaller pattern to fill in around the leaves and then will give way to another larger fill pattern. Not sure what yet.

I've tried multiple ways to control the quilt as I am moving it around the machine. The latest one is this ring called a Halo. I find that I like it a lot. I tended to get my hands hung up under the machine when I used Ann Petersen's quilt movers. Those were pieces of shelf lining. Basically it worked pretty good, but I like the Halo better. I hated quilting gloves. They were always in the way when I needed to do something delicate.

Take care all.