This month someone asked me to quilt a quilt for them. Of course!
She lives in a hot state, and so we decided to try quilting it without batting. I'm always up for experiments. I've quilted a few things without batting when I'm just working on test patterns, but that's been mainly to get the motion down and not caring too much about how it turns out.
Overall, I'd say it was a successful experiment. There were a few hiccups along the way, and I just wanted to document them for future reference.
1. It was hard to get the tension correct. It wasn't bad, as I couldn't just pull the thread out of the quilt like I can when it isn't working, but I did have some eyelashes when making the loops. I think the lack of batting was the issue here, as I haven't been having that problem otherwise.
2. The thread broke a surprising number of times. Sometimes I was about to throw my machine across the room because they were happening so often and sometimes I could almost get a row completed before it broke. I did get some new thread and changed the needle. I know my machine often has some nests in the bottom of the quilt that I need to fix at the end and I wonder if the thread just broke instead of creating a nest. (Although it still seemed to happen more often than normal.) Jury's still out on whether this was a thread issue, machine issue, or no batting issue. Luckily, it has a pretty easy fix...it just takes a bit longer at the end to bury all the extra thread ends.
I sadly forgot to get a picture of the quilt before I packed it up, but I did get some pictures of the back with the quilting. The loops are nice and big and I enjoyed doing them so large! I usually end up with small loops because that's just what my arms do, but I'll have to remember that I can do large loops too.
