Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased this book because I feel I'm still a "newbie" in the area of Free Motion Quilting (FMQ). This book touts the use of a walking foot, as opposed to using a FM foot, and a regular stitch on your machine (as opposed to regulating the stitches with the speed you are moving the quilt) While I found the pictures of the techniques used inspiring, the book offered no demo or pictures to show how to use the walking foot effectively. I found I was having to "manhandle" my quilt, tugging and pulling it through my machine to get it to pivot. No, it wasn't the size of the quilt (my quilt was 48 x 65), nor was it the size of my desktop (45 x 60 inches, with an extension on the left side to hold the quilt. The bottom line was that the author forgot to insert pictures of how she specifically performed the technique. There were pointers on using daisy head pins (flat tipped straight pins which are usually a No No in quilting) to pin down the freezer paper templates. The reason why these pins aren't used much is because you stick yourself trying to move the quilt. And yes, I did get stuck; many times. You don't know the pain of having a pin stuck in your hand while you are trying to move that hand to move the quilt around. Ouch! What I ended up doing was pressing the sharp point of the pin down into the fabric (so it wouldn't stick up and thereby stick me). This helped a little. The book would have been better if the chapters were broken down into demos that the author used on her quilts. After all the subtitle states: "Learn to use Your Walking Foot", but there was no teaching to "learn". I wouldn't think that this information would be so proprietary that it should be omitted--it's important! But there were some nice pictures of a Bernina sewing machine (methinks the company was involved in the book in some way) and how to use monofilament thread. If you have some quilting skills and want to glance over a book that has nice pictures on techniques, then this book is for you. But if you want to learn this technique, you'd be better off spending your money elsehere.