Quilting: Curves with a Walking Foot

My new adventure in quiling is to see what I can do with a walking foot and curves.  Here's my first attempt:

front side

back side

I did vertical stitching, too, but it doesn't really show in the photo.  The fabrics are quilting cotton FQs and the batting is a cotton/poly blend.

For some reason, I thought doing curves with a walking foot would be difficult.  It's not!  The fabric turns easily as a knife in soft butter.   I've completely lost my fear of doing curves with a walking foot.

From my first attempt, I also learned:

1. Keep my speed at slow to moderate.  My walking doesn't like to race at full speed.  (I'll have to tape something to my foot pedal to prevent me from pushing it down all the way.) 

2. Handle the fabric gently.  A firm hand prevented the walking foot from doing it's job of pulling the fabric through in even increments.

3. Clear objects out of the way.  Even simple objects like my pincushion interfered with the walking foot's ability to pull evenly.

4. Increase my stitch length.  My usual length of 2.5 didn't work well -- the stitches were too tight.  A stitch length of 3.0 or 3.5 works much better on my machine.

Next, I sandwiched some scraps of cotton with a fleece backing and cotton/poly batting to see how that would do.  Wow!  It was so easy!  The fleece and batting stick together almost like velcro so there's very little shifting.

This sample used an owl fleece from Walmart and I love the results.  The sample below used Blizzard fleece from JoAnn's.  The thread shows more on the fleece side.  Maybe I'd like it better if I had used a darker thread in the bobbin.

Overall, I love the effect of quilting on fleece.  I'm now excited to tackle that tub full of unfinished tops taking up space in my sewing shed.