A Little Tweak Here, Another Tweak There....

And finally--success!!

I took some time yesterday and today to play on the quilting beast, and it was so much fun. Of course, being the first time I've really ever stitched on a long arm, I didn't expect to do anything productive, just play and take care of whatever might come up. I didn't have a clue what that might entail, but I figured there were lots of things I didn't know I didn't know, so I was ready for anything.

Fortunately, it went well--I didn't break anything!! However, as you can see, some tweaking of the tension was definitely needed.

The solid green is the back of my test quilt sandwich so you can easily see how the stitches started out, what a bit of tweaking did for it, and how it finally finished today. As I made small-ish changes to the top tension, I would test by trying out a row of loop-de-loops, waves, the alphabet, just getting a feel for the movement and speed. Clearly, making only adjustments to the top tension wasn't going to do it, so today I decided to adjust the bobbin tension. Fortunately, a little more than a quarter turn did the trick.

Then today when I first started stitching, the machine would barely move and sounded terrible! Oh, no. What happened? Did I do something wrong?... RELAX! It's just a simple sewing machine after all--nothing foreign, just a different size and configuration, really. Guess what? All it needed was a drop of oil in the bobbin chase, then all was well again.

So, I'm learning a bit about my LAQ machine, about loading/racking the quilt and moving to each new section, and getting a feel for coordinating my movement and speed with the machine's speed. My final few rows look better than I expected after just a couple hours of actual stitching.

I think I'm going to like this!!

Now to load the next sandwich and see if I can get better at loops and stippling...