Free Motion Sewing

Ha! I am learning a lot of stuff!  If you haven't checked out my link to Ellen Lindner, you should.  I downloaded her ebook class on Color and spent some time working on it yesterday.  I probably have  a couple more days of work to finish it.  But by watching a video of her and looking at her quilts and looking up stuff on 'art quilts' I discovered this thing called free motion sewing. 

It turns out my sewing machine has a couple of other feet I've never used.  A 'darning' plate and foot, and a 'walking foot'.  If you use the darning foot, you can sew backwards, forwards, sideways, in circles, it's unlimited!  You have to be careful not to make a mess of the back (by pulling the threads to the top before sewing.  Anyway, here is my first try... you can see the possibilities.  You can use fabric to make pictures...  how fun!

I learned something else too... it's called 'hiding your tails'.   How could I have been sewing for close to 50 years and not know about this?  It's basically leaving a longer tail on a thread and then sewing the tail back into the piece instead of just clipping it off.