Walking Foot Quilting Workshop with Melissa Marginet

What a treat to recently gather for our first guild workshop in a very long time!  Held virtually via Zoom, Melissa Marginet, our speaker from our December 2021 guild meeting, led us through  her excellent  Intro to Walking Foot Quilting workshop, all from her home in Beausejour Manitoba. Melissa is an excellent teacher.

In just 3 hours we learned a lot about walking feet, thread, marking, useful tools and much more, AND we quilted our own 16" x 16" little quilt that we had prepared in advance.

Course Description:
​"You will be guided through quilting a small quilt with your walking foot. You will learn the basic skills of walking foot quilting and plenty of tips and tricks to help you along the way to quilting all your own quilts on your home sewing machine."

Melissa encouraged us to leave our microphones unmuted to more closely create the feel of an in-person workshop and that worked very well as we could ask questions as we went, and Melissa continued to share interesting information and photos as we did our machine work. Her encouragement us to embrace "consistently inconsistent quilting" is memorable!

Look at all of the smiling faces at the group Show (without the Tell) at the end of the afternoon.

The Tell part was added when these quilts were shown at our January guild meeting!

Some of the makers' comments included:

"It was great learning and sharing and I loved seeing what others were creating. Melissa did a great job engaging us and making us feel comfortable to create what ever we want. My “a ha” moment and take away was when she explained that when using coordinating thread to quilt it creates texture and when we use bold or contrasting threads it emphasizes the design of the quilting. Brilliant!!!"

"I enjoyed the workshop"

"​It was a wonderful and fun workshop."

"This was an excellent workshop. I really enjoyed it and I learned a lot. I'll be trying this design on a quilt very soon."
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Melissa has written 2 books on walking foot quilting and she offered our guild members an opportunity to purchase them directly from her.

Melissa's web site is  http://melissamarginet.ca

​-- Janet Brownlee, Communications