The walking foot (cheap generic from ebay, about £11.00) was a roaring success, lovely even stitches with a minimum of fuss. It was very easy to fit as well. I have also developed a method for keeping the weight of the quilt from dragging on the machine, and corrupting my stitches. It involves an ironing board and a lot of books. (Big books, including the Harley Davidson encyclopedia, a Collins thesaurus and the Encyclopedia of Photography.) These are stacked round the sewing machine to form a platform, as I do not yet own a sewing machine table, and are working pretty well, (Kindles are ace, but there are some things they just can’t do!) spreading the weight of the quilt.
The sewing machine itself is on the dining room table, and I’ve got the ironing board set up level with it to my left. It’s all a bit Heath Robinson, I know, but I have to work with what I’ve got at the moment, and, notwithstanding human error, I’m pretty pleased with the results. I do need to find a way to get a sewing machine table and a machine with a bigger harp space (even one or two inches can make a massive difference) which are within my budget.
Here’s the commandeered Janome 150 of my mother with the walking foot attached:
From the front we can see the cause of some of my human error:
The needle is positioned nearer to the right hand side of the foot, as we are looking at it, than the left. This doesn’t cause any problems in sewing, but it did cause me some confusion as to why my lines of stitching were inconsistently spaced. Once I worked it out, the results improved greatly!
Wraparound Art 