I’m crazy for zigzag designs! Learn how to quilt a funky new Crazy Ziggie design with both walking foot quilting and ruler foot quilting:
Quick Links to things in this tutorial:
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Tips for Quilting Crazy Ziggie with Walking Foot Quilting
Just like quilting Crazy Lines, all you need to think about when quilting Crazy Ziggie is forming a simple zigzag line. Play with funky angles and experiment with the spacing of your lines to create an interesting vertical or horizontal texture on your quilts.
When quilting with your walking foot, you’ll need to always have the quilt feeding towards you because the walking foot uses the feed dogs on your machine to pull the quilt forward in a traditional way.
To create the zigzag lines, you'll have to stop with the needle down and rotate the quilt slightly. Keep this in mind when using Crazy Ziggie in bigger quilts - those direction changes can get tiresome really quick!
I also mentioned getting a Wild First Stitch after the direction changes. This happens when you're pushing just a bit too hard on the sandwich and pushing the needle out of center position. When you take the next stitch, the needle will spring back into the center, sometimes resulting in a very weird first stitch.
If you find yourself struggling with this, take a lighter hand on your quilt and if you see the needle moving away from the center position, stop, lift the foot to take the pressure off the quilt and smooth it back out so the needle moves back into the center.
Quilting Crazy Ziggie with Ruler Foot Quilting
Another wonderful type of machine quilting is Ruler Foot Quilting. This is a style of free motion quilting with a special ruler darning foot that's designed with a high base so you can press rulers or templates against the side of the foot to help control the quilting design.
In the quilting video I used the Slice Quilting Ruler to quilt Crazy Ziggie across a small quilt sandwich. I continued to push the ruler and quilt through the machine in a forward direction just like walking foot quilting, mostly because it felt a bit more natural and easier to move in that direction.
With ruler foot quilting, you can quilt in all directions... theoretically.
I say theoretically because it’s only a theory that you can quilt in all directions with free motion quilting or ruler foot quilting. In reality, you are limited by the directions and angles your machine LIKES to stitch.
If you notice your thread shredding or breaking, that’s a sign your machine may not like that direction and you’ll need to rotate your quilt to avoid it.
On smaller machines like my Eversewn Sparrow 20, I’ve also found that some angles feel a bit awkward to slide both the quilt and the ruler at the same time. In this case, I often rotate the quilt so I’m pushing it through the machine much like walking foot quilting because it feels easier to hang onto everything at once.
You may feel like this limits the advantage of ruler foot quilting and, yes, it always takes more time to rotate your quilt around. However, keep in mind that you can significantly speed up your movement and machine speed with ruler foot quilting so while you are shifting the quilt more, you’re also able to put your foot down and speed through the design.
I made a really cute little design just combining Crazy Ziggie and Straight Lines on a little quilt sandwich. I then threw more thread at it and added extra texture with intense free motion quilting designs. I decided to turn this into a simple quilted zippered pouch and will be sharing a tutorial on how to make this on Monday!
Would you like to create a big, beautiful quilt AND learn how to machine quilt lots of different designs with many different types of machine quilting? Then you should join in the fun and make the Marvelous Mosaic Quilt with me!
We're quilting all 30 designs from the book Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day and we're going to connect together the best 20 to create the Marvelous Mosaic Quilt. Find the quilt pattern and detailed instructions in the book, available in the following formats:
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Click Here to find all the walking foot quilting videos I've shared so far. We're making three quilts together from this book and you can join in the fun and follow along anytime!
Let's go quilt,
Leah Day
Find more walking foot quilting tutorials by clicking the links below:
