Quilting: Spirals with a Walking Foot

For my next attempts at doing curves with a walking foot, I decided to try spirals.  I layered some scraps of cotton, batting and flannel, gave them a quick press with the iron, and dove right in.  The two You-Tube videos I had watched both said that spirals have to be stitched clockwise, so I stitched a clockwise spiral.  Neither video said why spirals had to go clockwise, so I sandwiched more scraps and sewed a counter-clockwise spiral.

As you can see, the clockwise spiral looks better than the counter-clockwise one, but it is possible to sew a counter-clockwise spiral with a walking foot,  In my case, I'm left-handed and always have an easier time sewing curves where the pivot point is to the left of the needle, such as clockwise spirals.  When doing counter-clockwise spirals, the pivot point is to the right of the needle where there isn't much room to work with.  This might be why the instructors in the videos said to do clockwise spirals.  But with enough practice, I think I can get the hang of doing counter-clockwise spirals.

However, it is possible to sew a counter-clockwise spiral without sewing counter-clockwise: just flip the quilt sandwich upside-down so the backing is on top and sew a clockwise spiral.  When the sandwich is flipped back over, the spiral seen on top will be counter-clockwise!  How do I know this?  The image you see above is the backing (the stitching show up better on flannel) and I had to flip the image vertically in my imaging software to make the spirals show correctly for illustration purposes.  The unaltered image is below.