What is one way to get perfect quilted feathers?  Let your embroidery machine quilt it for you!  For my Friday Night with Friends, I tested out some digitized quilting feathers.  I haven't used my embroidery machine for quilting before, so this was something new for me to try.

You may remember I have this small blue quilt top that I did for an online digitized quilting class at Quilt University.

I'm finally getting around to getting the quilting done for this top.  This is the quilt design layout for it.

I use Vilene which is a light, non-woven, water-soluble stabilizer.

I then stitched my first placement line, and promptly had to rip it out.  The placement lines done on the quilt are supposed to be done in waer-soluble thread.

First un-sewing of the night.  Ugh.

 I knew I had water-soluble thread somewhere.  I bought it a long time ago, and never used it.  After digging through my sewing box, I found it!

I knew it would find a use one day.

I didn't realize this wash-a-way thread was so precious that they don't give you much on a spool.  I wound a bobbin, and it used up the entire spool before it finished.  So I wound off half onto another bobbin and used the bobbins for my top and bottom thread.  These placement lines are only needed temporarily so they will be washed out when the quilt is complete.

Placement lines stitched in wash-away thread.

I've been wanting to use this blue variegated thread that I've had, so I used it first, but didn't like the way it looked at all.  It looks like half of the feathers are missing.  I used a Sulky blue viscose thread for the second part of the design, and I liked it much better.

I don't like the look of the blue variegated thread used on the bottom feather.

To complete the center quilting design, I hooped another piece of stabilizer and lined up the design to match the placement lines of the first design.  I stitched the placement lines for the second hooping.  The lines matched up so all would be good.   The second design stitched out well.

Test of center design stitched.

 I then test stitched the large triangle and double small-triangle area designs.


They came out good, so I figured my testing was done.   Then I thought the tread color was too dark to be used as quilting on the quilt top, so I restitched part of the center design with a lighter shade of blue that more closely matched this background fabric.

Final test of quilting feathers.