By Janome Maker: Leila Makes
Free Motion Quilting (FMQ) has always been such a cool technique to me and while I’ve dabbled in it once or twice, I’m definitely still working on honing in on my FMQ skills and I thought I’d take you all along for the ride with a bit of a twist ~ instead of the conventional FMQ using a quilt sandwich, I tried out the Janome Quilting & Ruler Kit for the HD9 and experimented with free motion topstitching on a pair of pants!
I set out to make the Cedar Pants pattern, designed by yours truly, and stopped halfway through construction so that I would have separate leg panels and pockets to add topstitching flair to before sewing them all together to make a wearable garment.
Supplies Needed:
- HD Quilting & Ruler Kit, which includes: a convertible FMQ foot set, convertible free-motion frame quilting feet, free-motion glider, needle pack, 6” curved ruler, 8” x 2” straight ruler
- What I used from the kit for this tutorial:
- Convertible FMQ foot set, which includes a darning plate to raise the sewing surface and effectively “drop” the feed dogs, a closed-toe foot, and an open-toe frame quilting foot
- Free-motion glider mat, that keeps your sewing surface smooth for moving around your fabric as you FMQ
- What I didn’t use from the kit for this tutorial:
- Convertible free-motion frame quilting feet, i.e., additional FMQ foot attachments: ¼” ruler foot, side open-toe foot
- Needle pack (75/11), ideal for straight line sewing; I used a 90/14 needle for this tutorial, as I was working with thick topstitching thread (Gutermann Mara 30) and a thick twill fabric for pants
- 6” curved ruler, used for scalloping or curved FMQ designs
- 8” x 2” straight ruler, used for straight line FMQ designs
- What I used from the kit for this tutorial:
- Janome HD9 Professional machine, using an extension table is helpful here
- Topstitching thread, such as Gutermann Mara 30 (used in this tutorial)
- Fabric marker, such as Frixxion heat erasable pen*
- *Note: some users warn that the Frixxion pen markings can re-appear in extremely cold temperatures. I have been using this pen for all of my hand embroidery work and used to live in Alberta, Canada (i.e., COLD climate!) with NO pen marking reappearance. So, I feel confident using this pen for my project.
- If you would like to be more precautious, consider a water-soluble pen marker that is designed specifically for fabric marking.
- Fabric or garment piece to topstitch on, preferably a mid- or heavy- weight fabric, to handle thick topstitching thread nicely
Tips & Tricks for Free-Motion Topstitching:
As I’ve never tried FMQ in the form of topstitching on a garment before, I jotted down some helpful tips and tricks that I picked up along the way.
- Read the included FMQ foot instructions 🙂
- I’m of the “dive head first” variety and learned that it isn’t as simple as just dropping your feed dogs and getting to work. I also needed to adjust the height of the FMQ foot so that it is hovering just above the fabric for it to be able to freely move.
- Adjust tension as needed
- See one of my previous blog posts on topstitching tips & tricks to adjust your thread tension as needed.
- For the HD9 Professional, I ended up setting my thread tension to 4. This setting may be different (higher or lower) on your machine, so be sure to test out different tensions until you get it right.
- Practice practice practice
- Get ready to practice on plenty of scrap fabrics (ideally, the same fabric or a similar weighted fabric that you intend to topstitch on)
- At the start, FMQ did not feel natural to me at all. Practice first to get used to hand placement and ideal speed as you sew through your design.
- Since the stitch length is determined by the speed that you push the fabric through the machine, get used to your pace and aim for a consistent stitch length – I chose ~3 mm stitch length pace.
- Go SLOW
- Slow down your sewing machine speed and adjust as needed to get into a good “rhythm” with free-motion sewing
- Little tidbits/food for thought
- Ensure that you have enough length on your thread ends at the start and finish of your topstitching so that you can bring the ends to the wrong side and tie them off, to prevent any unraveling later on.
- Hold the upper thread as you start sewing to prevent bunching up on the wrong side
- Even though your feed dogs are technically “dropped”, it’s still good practice to set your stitch length to 0, even if it’s just to keep the feed dogs from inadvertently moving your fabric forward as you sew.
- If you’ve exhausted all ideas on thread tension manipulation, consider adding a stabilizer to your fabric to help. I ended up using an adhesive wash-away embroidery stabilizer and applied it to the wrong side of my fabric to help with my topstitching and it helped a lot!
- When you’ve tried all of the above tips & tricks and still run into issues, I highly recommend that you try the oldest trick in the book: turn off your machine and WALK AWAY. I did this about five times throughout my project and it helped reset my mood and maybe my machine (probably not, but I’d like to think so!)
Steps:
1. Preparation
- Use a fabric marker to draw on your designs
Be mindful that your designs should be fairly simple for sewing a continuous line or you’ll be stuck tying off an endless supply of thread ends. Your goal should be to sew the entire design in one pass (or maybe 3-4 if you’re like me).
2. Set up your HD9 for FMQ
- Change your needle plate to a raised darning plate, choose your preferred FMQ foot attachment and change the foot. I opted to use the open-toe foot so that I could see where I was sewing with my design lines.
3. Free-Motion TOPSTITCH!
- I cannot emphasize this enough, PRACTICE FIRST ON SCRAP FABRIC! I practiced before each design to ensure that my tension, thread, bobbin were all working well together. I ran into hurdles with my thread tension and it shows. But that is the beauty of sewing your own pieces – they may not be perfect on the first go. Every “mistake” can be viewed as a lesson, and with each adjustment, I got closer to a result I was happy with.
4. Final touches
- Apply heat or water to remove your fabric pen markings and double check that you didn’t miss any topstitching areas in your design(s). I didn’t notice on a couple of my designs that I completely missed a section because the pen filled in the design so well.
- I used a wash-away stabilizer on the wrong side of my fabric, so I went ahead and sewed the pants together then threw them in the wash so that the stabilizer could magically disappear 🙂
I hope you enjoyed this little foray into FMQ with a topstitching twist 🙂 This feels like a baby step towards investing in a chain stitch machine and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
I wanted to share the finished product from the inside (see photos below), as this was NOT an easy project to work on. There were many moments of tension adjustments, ripping out thread, and starting over. I view these pants as an experiment, one that I will gladly try again and continue to work on the ideal combination of tension adjustments, fabric, use of stabilizer, and differing thread thicknesses to find the ideal situation that works for me and my machine.
