14. Feet

I have three feet for my sewing machine. Here, the sewing machine is footless. Don't pay attention to the fuzz. It's time to clean the sewing machine. But you can see the basics there. The needle, the thread, and the open bobbin case for the lower thread.

This is the machine with its normal foot. When I got this machine, this was the foot that came with it. This foot is fine. You want to piece a bunch of little triangles together? Sure. Sew up a dress for Sophia to wear in a wedding? No problem. But you can't quilt with it. Nope.
For that, you need these. Either of these, but both is better, of course. The first one here is a walking foot. I also use this for very long sewing projects, like banners at church. A walking foot, well, walks. It has "teeth" that match up with the teeth (or sometimes I've heard it called "feed dogs" but I don't know why) on the bottom of the machine. The top piece of fabric gets moved along at the same speed as the bottom. This isn't an issue for small stretches of sewing, nor is it a problem when the things being sewn are thin. But if you combine long lengths of stitches with thick layers of batting and backing, you get a big puckering headache. That's not a pun. The whole thing will pucker and shift and look lousy. The walking foot solves this problem.Why not just use it all the time? I thought that, too. But it is loud and slower than the other basic foot. So I do use it more often than I might if I wasn't a quilter--and it is essential to do things like match up plaids and stripes--but I don't use it for everyday.

The last foot here is an embroidery foot. Like peanut butter goes with jelly, the embroidery foot is useless unless it comes with a plate to cover the feed dogs. More advanced machines have a lever to lower the feed dogs, but I was able to order this little plastic plate to go over them and there you go. Tricked it up just fine. The embroidery foot is for embroidery (duh) and free motion quilting. If you have a machine quilted quilt, all those curlicues and puzzle shapes and stars and waves come from embroidery feet (well, not really--but they could. Most likely they came from a programmable long-arm quilting machine, but I live in a house, not a warehouse, and I just can't go there yet, especially when this works "just fine for government use" (where does THAT idiom come from and why is it in MY head?).
I've had folks ask about quilting on a home machine, and that's how you do it. That's how I do it all, in fact. So much of life is just having the right equipment.