It all started when I attached my walking foot and did a little experimentation on the sample piece that I started at Pocono Sew and Vac a couple weeks ago.

I was feeling confident after that, so I pulled out the piece I created to cover my husband’s night stand. It will coordinate with a queen sized quilt that I will eventually create for the bed. I’ve been referring to that project as my Log Cabin Quilt. I started by doing come stabilizing stitching through the center most patches using one continuous line. I then quilted the blocks with a double echo of patches using one continuous line of quilting for each block half. This meant that I had fewer ends to knot and hide.

Here is a closeup of the quilting as well as the rounded corners that I decided to use for this piece. I really enjoyed using the walking foot. It felt really natural to use.

Originally I had intended to place this piece on top of the night stand so that the sides of the piece would be parallel with the sides of the night stand. After seeing how nice the corners looked, however, I got the idea to turn the piece 45 degrees and allow the corners to hang down in the front and the back, and to stick out on the left and the right.

When I changed the orientation of the piece, the curved corners were shown to optimal benefit. In addition to that, it became clear that the darker segment of the piece exactly fit the depth of the night stand. It looked as if it had been planned that way, even though it was merely a happy accident.

I decided to allow the plexiglass to remain as protection for the quilted piece. We like our coffee in bed, and it is easy to spill when placing a cup on the nightstand.

There is only one thing I am unhappy about. I appear to have broken my walking foot by using it to do the curved corners on the binding. Looking at the way the fabric bunches up below it makes sense that having more fabric on the left side of the foot may have put undue pressure on the top level feed dogs.

I can’t be 100% sure that the foot is broken, but after doing that binding it only works properly for a short distance and then it ends up giving me really tiny stitches for awhile. And the threads on the bottom get messed up a bit. I cleaned the machine just incase it needed it, but that didn’t help. It is really a shame because I didn’t realize that the curved corners might hurt the foot. What a shame. I was really enjoying the walking foot while it lasted.

Although my love affair with hand quilting is not yet over, my love affair with machine quilting (at least with the walking foot) has definitely begun. I’ll be purchasing a replacement soon.

Tonight I will be taking my walking foot to my guild meeting and comparing it to one that works to see if I can figure out what the problem is.