Can I just tell you how awesome Jacquie Gering’s newest Craftsy class is? It’s called Creative Quilting With Your Walking Foot and is truly one of the best classes I’ve watched.
Jacquie’s class is chock full of good tips and tricks for using your walking foot to achieve amazing machine quilted results. One of my favorite tongue-in-cheek reminders she offered is that it’s a walking foot, not a running foot! So going slow is the key to walking foot quilting success. 🙂
I’ve met Jacquie in person a few times and am currently working with her on some behind-the-scenes QuiltCon show prep. She is probably one of the most kind-hearted people I’ve ever met, and she really cares about those to whom she teaches. In this class, she’s all about sharing what she knows in such an easy-going conversational way, that you can’t help but enjoy every minute of the class.
Sinking Sun by Jacquie Gering – one of my all-time favorites! Image courtesy of Jacquie.
In Creative Quilting With Your Walking Foot, Jacquie makes the comparison of quilting to a good paint job: more time may be spent prepping your work than you think, but good preparation is another key to good quilting success. She echoes my sentiments that proper basting and good tools help eliminate puckers and tucks. She prefers spray basting and flat battings (hear, hear!) and one tip I picked up was that you can iron your cotton batting to help get it nice and smooth. Now why didn’t I think of that??
One of my favorite “modern” quilting textures is matchstick quilting where you literally quilt every 1/4″ to 1/8″ over the surface of your quilt. I love Jacquie’s method for achieving precise lines that add such amazing texture to her quilts! If nothing else, this class is worth it for that demo alone!
Jacquie’s amazing matchstick quilting – one of my favorite techniques!
The Class runs for approximately 3 1/2 hours, broken up into 8 easily digestible lessons. Topics covered include walking foot basics, decorative stitches, quilting curves & text, and more! It ends with a section on quilting strategies which is super helpful for you to learn how to manage the bulk of a large quilt under the machine.
Jacquie validates many of the techniques that I like to employ in my walking foot quilting, such as using the edge of your foot as a guide and counting stitches when figuring out when to turn your work for echo quilting.
Jacquie shows how to quilt wonderfully straight lines as shown in Hidden Gems, above.
I love how Jacquie is not afraid to shy away from quilting large quilts and she doesn’t even quilt with a super-sized machine, either. She introduces several ways to add gentle curves to your quilts, and she offers tips on how to start and stop, along with what to do when you run out of thread.
I personally get excited when others finally understand just how fun quilting your own quilts can be. With this class, you can learn how to quilt all those quilts (modern or not) without feeling like free-motion quilting is your only option to achieve amazing results.
Jacquie’s hexagon quilt – all done on her home machine. Image courtesy of Jacquie.
I highly recommend Creative Quilting With Your Walking Foot. In fact, I think I’ll go watch it again, just to pick up more tips that I may have missed the first time around!
About Me – Kind of obvious, right? This was probably the hardest page to write to describe myself and what I’m all about. However, it does include some super cool artwork my friend drew, including fun captions that go along with each of my quilting caricatures!
Christa Quilts 