7 Days of New Years --- Day 6: New Year's Eve and All is Well!

I was hoping to finish up the quilting on the Fat Quarter Disappearing Nine-Patch today.  As noted yesterday, all I had left to stitch were parts of the quilt I planned to free-motion quilt.  However, I was nervous about doing it on my Singer 401 as I have never done that extensively on that machine.  

I have seen Karen Miller's articles and webinars on doing FMQ on a Featherweight so figure that if it proves difficult on the 401, I could change over to that machine.  A second fall back would be to put my Brother Nouvelle mid-arm back in the table.  After doing Angela Walter's "Fabulous Feathers" free-motion quilting challenge from late 2021 to the beginning of this year, I am now also more comfortable doing FMQ on that machine.   

So I started by setting up the machine with a (slant shank) free-motion foot and put together a test sandwich.  Good news, it went well!  

The free-motion foot I used.

Tested a lot of different motifs and all went well!

Edited to Add:  It should be noted, that on the Singer 401, although the feed plate can be raised to "lower" the feed dogs (which is intended to allow for darning in a hoop with a darning foot):

...I actually kept the plate down and feed dogs up while doing the FMQ.  This is something Leah Day used to espouse early on in the days when she started doing her year of doing daily free motion designs.  I also found a high top tension -- set at 6 or 7 -- worked best to limit the "pokies" on the back.  

So with the successful test, I moved on to quilting the remaining nine sections I needed to stitch.  I got six of those done before calling it a night.

I only have the two large floral sections and the large red holly leaf print section left.  I'm not sure I like the outlining I started to do on the first large floral section.  I needed a break from it to continue working on it and think I might try just doing feathers on the remaining section.  I was stitching holly leaves and berries on the holly print but the thread I was using kept breaking.  Since I had quilted other sections with the same thread (although with a walking foot), I chalked it up to both me and the machine being tired.    

So that's it for the quilting for this year!  So now we're ready to celebrate the New Year coming in:

Sparkling Apple Cider and "Taste-Like-Fruitcake Cookies"

I hope everyone has an enjoyable time watching the New Year ring in!  May we all get to celebrate 2023 as a year for new beginnings and wishes fulfilled!