Free Motion Quilting without any presser foot

Free Motion Quilting with no presser foot. Can all machine free motion quilt?

I have this industrial machine at my mum’s house and I have always wondered whether I could free motion quilt on it. It has a large throat space and the speed is marvelous.

Absolutely love it for straight-line stitching, but I do wonder if I can free motion quilt on it.

I know that any machine could actually free motion quilt, because it is all about getting the needle up and down, and being able to move the quilt.

So, I hunted for a suitable foot for this machine to be able free motion quilt on the machine but I couldn’t find one that suits.

Hence, I decided to go ahead without any presser foot.

How do you quilt without a free motion quilting foot

Of course, you can always just do straight line quilting. This Juki Industrial machine I’m using can quilt a straight line without the walking foot. It has a very steady feeding system. I may reduce the foot pressure to allow the quilt sandwich to pass without puckering.

But, you can actually free motion quilt too without a foot and that is what I’m going to share in this post and video below.

There are affiliate links within this post in which I may earn a commission from. Read full disclosure here.

Do you need to quilt without a presser foot?

Now before you want to start without the foot, why not check first whether you can get a free motion quilting foot for your machine. The free motion quilting foot will help so much to ease the free motion quilting.

So you may want to ask yourself,

Does my machine have a suitable free motion quilting foot?

Maybe it is in a form of a darning foot or maybe your machine can use the generic Free Motion Quilting Foot. If so, you want to knwo whether your machine is High Shank or Low shank?

You can read more detail about that in this post all about motion quilting foot.

If you can’t find one that match at all after spending a couple of bucks trying this or the generic ones, then you can try quilting without the foot.

Can you start free motion quilting with no presser foot?

The short answer to that is YES. But, it is not as easy to start and may also be dangerous for newbies to start here.

There’ll be no guard or any obstacle in between your fingers and the needles.

Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend this technique if you are not confident. However, maybe a hoop might help. Just find the bigger size hoop and move the hoops as you free motion quilt. This will require practice as it is a little different than just moving the quilt with your palm.

free motion quilting with no presser foot

How to get started

Free Motion Quilting without any presser foot:

In the video below, I show you how I get started with getting the machine to free motion quilt without the presser foot.

All the links I mentioned in the video:

What to set up?

take off the foot, use the larger eye needle – find the suitable needle for your machine. For the industrial Juki, I am using an Organ needle, size 90 or 110
try and catch up with the wheel manually first
try some stitches
adjust the top thread tension
if it snaps – maybe the way you move is causing the thread to stress not at the right time.

Things to consider when quilting without a presser foot

Use a hoop to protect your hand from getting too close to the needle and to help keep the quilt sandwich in place.
If not, take care of your hand.
Limit your practices to simple motion and notice if there are any particular trends. Sometimes, the machine does not prefer a certain movement – it creates high tension due to the way the threading is. There’s not much we can do, but just noticing it can help you decide to limit those sorts of movements.

For example, my machine will experience higher tension when I move the quilt to the left while I stitch. The thread wraps onto the needle and creates a higher tension. Hence it can easily snap when I move to the left.

Therefore, I try and avoid moving to the left, instead just turn the quilt instead so I can cover the area by moving it in the other direction and not to the left.

Problems when quilting without the quilting foot

- The fabric piece or the quilt sandwich tends to
- The tension is harder to control because of the changes in the tension as the fabric is moving up and down together with the needle
- when the tension is too high at some point, the thread will break. A good thread can help a lot if the thread seems to break so often that no stitches forms.

In conclusion, you can free-motion quilt without the presser foot, but it will be challenging to get started and can be very dangerous.

But definitely doable, I enjoyed quilting my Sewcialites quilt with this machine and highly recommend you try too if you have the machine and take advantage of that large throat area of the sewing machine.

2 Comments

Suzanne G. 2 years ago Reply

Fascinating stuff Amira!
I’ve tried no-presser foot quilting a few times with my big, old Brother quilting machine. It has almost 12 inches of harp space which really helps when moving a big quilt around. Originally, I did this because I have several quilting feet and all of them “hopped”. This drove my old eyes into a tizzy and made it very difficult to follow my pattern! So, I tried without and that didn’t work for me either. I had installed a brand-new size 12 quilting needle but every time the needle came up, the fabric came partway up with it – very annoying. Luckily, I haven’t had any thread breaking when going left or right, but the quilt popping up with the needle was just a pain. I know about but never used the embroidery hoop method and I expect that would work very well; I just never tried. Then a year or 2 ago I found a video (sorry, I don’t remember where) which showed how to change a hopping foot to a non-hopping foot. Problem solved! I’m now very happily quilting away with a foot which doesn’t distract my eyes during FMQ.
Persephone 5 months ago Reply

You saved my life with this video!!! I was ready to give up on a dress that is a final project for college, but this video just saved me soooooo much work. Thank you thank you thank you! You explained in such a perfect way. I’ll definitely look at your other videos. 🙂