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3 Quick Hacks for Faster Hand Quilting

2/21/2017

Quilters who are truly in a hurry to get their quilts finished do not quilt them by hand, so it may seem a bit ironic to offer speed tips for hand quilters. Maybe I shouldn't call them speed tips. How about efficiency tips? How about Spend-less-time-on-the-little-time-consuming-things-that-aren't-actually-stitching tips? Whatever you call them, here are three of my favorites:

1. Get a Grip

Hand quilting needles, "betweens", are short. Once you get them loaded up with half a dozen tiny stitches, there's not much needle left to grab to pull through the layers. Besides being little, they're slippery.

Struggling to get a firm grasp on my needle is one of my top hand quilting frustrations. Fortunately, it's also one of the easiest to solve.

There are several grip-enhancing options available for purchase. You can buy a little rubber "grab-it" disc at your local quilt shop. I've used them, and they work quite well. You can also get a "rubber thumb" from an office supply store. I've used those, too. They work well enough, but can feel bulky and awkward. Finger cots, small balloons, or a fingertip cut from an old pair of dishwashing gloves also work, though they are not particularly durable.

My favorite needle-grabber is a rubber band. The best are the wide-ish ones used to secure bunches of asparagus or broccoli. (Another reason to eat your vegetables.) You probably have several floating around in a kitchen drawer.

These humble rubber bands have several advantages over the purchased options. For starters, they're readily available and free. If you lose one, no problem! Go back to that kitchen drawer and dig out another one. Unlike the rubber thumb, finger cot, or balloon, you don't have to wear it, so there's no interference with dexterity. Like the grab-it disc, it's easy to park it on the quilt's surface, but I prefer to loop it over my thumb to keep it handy.

Plus, they come in purple.

2. Go Topless

No, no, no! Keep your shirt on! I'm talking about your quilting hoop.

I quilt with a hoop, one of those wood ones like an industrial-size embroidery hoop. Mine is 14 inches, which allows me to quilt an entire 12-inch block without needing to re-position the hoop. I can rotate the hoop as needed so that I'm always quilting towards me. That's dandy.

For quilting a border or sashing, it's not so dandy. Long, narrow sections stitch up quickly, so the hoop needs to be moved along often. Re-tensioning the quilt in the hoop with each move takes quite a bit a time. That's a bother.

The solution is to dispense with the top of the hoop. In narrow sections, where the quilting design doesn't require rotating the quilt, tensioning the hoop is not necessary. I just use a clothes pin to secure the quilt at the top of the hoop (as in the photo, above), and leave the rest loose. Re-positioning becomes a matter of sliding the bottom/inner hoop along and re-clipping the clothes pin.

3. Say No to the Knot

Many years ago, I took a class at my local quilt shop called, "Big Stitch Quilting." Maybe you've used this technique. It's a hand quilting method using longer-than-normal stitches and big, very visible thread, like perle cotton.

With big thread, you're going to make a big knot, which is going to make a big hole in your quilt top if you pop the knot through in the usual way,

The solution is to forego the knot, and leave a long thread tail hanging out at the start of each section of stitching. At the end of the line of quilting, you bury the thread tail in the batting, as usual, but with this important difference: leave the thread knot-free, and weave it back and forth between your last few stitches. Visualize the tip of your needle traveling a slalom course through the batting layer, with the stitches as the gates. Then you go back and do the same thing with the tail at the start of the stitching line.

OK, so that's all about Big Stitch quilting. For regular hand quilting, it's much simpler.

First, you knot your thread and pop it through at the start of stitching just like you always do. Then at the end, skip the knot and bury the tail in the batting, right up close alongside the last several stitches. Weave it between stitches once or twice if you can. Your normal quilting stitches are going to be tiny, so weaving through more than one or two of them will be difficult (and I would never suggest that you do something the hard way).

Don't worry that the thread won't stay buried; just make it long enough. If you've ever had the misfortune of having to pick out quilting stitches, you know that thread isn't going anywhere.

One more advantage to skipping the ending knot, is that you can continue to quilt closer to the end of the thread. That's a boon for those of us who are always trying to eke out just a few more stitches before re-threading the needle.

Do you have a favorite hand- quilting hack? Share it by leaving a comment below.

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Make Your Own Easy Stencil-free Quilting Templates

2/14/2017

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After spending months as a UFO (that's quiltspeak for Un-Finished Object), my Lost Ships quilt has finally re-emerged to be quilted.

OK, to be honest, it's been waiting more than a few months. More like a couple of years, actually. The problem was, I had to find just the right quilting design.

It couldn't be too complicated; this quilt has been in progress long enough, and I really want it finished soon. Even so, I'm not ready to settle for something boring for the sake of hand-quilting speed.

The Lost Ships block has two triangular areas of different sizes to quilt, and I wanted those designs to be related, but not identical (because that would be boring). The design also had to fit the Lost Ships theme (because I said so).

Most importantly, the design had to be template-friendly. That is, it had to be adaptable to my stencil-free approach to quilt marking.

Using a stencil is a great way to mark a quilt. Stencils are available for lots of beautiful quilting designs from online vendors like quiltingstencils.com. The problem is that I never seem to find what I want in exactly the right size. Sure, you can cut your own stencils. I've done that. Frankly, it's a job that always finds me clenching my teeth and muttering, "There's got to be a better way!"

Finally, I discovered a better way. Unlike stencils, where the quilting lines are cut as narrow channels in the background matrix (tricky to plan and difficult to cut), my template method uses solid shapes (ultra-easy to cut).

Plus, because templates are a "trace-around" tool, they need to be somewhat rigid, but unlike stencils, they don't need to be thin. That means you don't need that pricey mylar material for your templates. Any card-stock will do. A panel from an empty cereal box will do very well, as my grandmother taught me. (My Scottish great-grandmother would approve.)

Let me demonstrate.

For the Lost Ships quilt, I decided on a pair of shell motifs, one quite simple, the other a bit elaborated.

The shell motif for the smaller triangle (at right) was simple enough to cut as a template. Despite its multiple lobes, it can be cut along all its lines, and remain intact as a single shape. Marking a quilt with this template will be a straight-forward matter of tracing around the outside edges of the cut-out template.

The larger shell motif (at left) is more complex. It comprises 5 distinct shapes. There's the shell, in blue, a pair of scrolls, in orange, and a pair of little connecting doo-dads, in yellow.

I'll cut this as 2 templates: the blue shell by itself, and all the scrolling parts together. Again, it's very simple to mark the quilt by tracing around the templates. Lines where the yellow and orange sections intersect are easy to fill in.

Let's look at one more not-so-obvious example. The quilting stencil shown at the right is "Follow Your Dreams," one of my favorites. It's a continuous-line design; building it from discreet shapes would require several pieces that are smaller than I prefer to handle.

Instead, the design can be rendered with 3 overlapping templates. The first is the overall outline of the design, and serves to mark the boundaries of the other two, which are rotated to cover the 4 sides and 4 corners, respectively. The overall outline template isn't strictly required, but it helps with visualizing the process. It's also handy for aligning the rotating shapes.

There's an even easier way to build this design using just one greatly simplified template. The 3-lobed shape at the right, traced 4 times, will capture all the intersecting lines of the pattern with very little repeated marking of the same lines.

Not every quilting design will lend itself readily to the template method. Spiraling lines are particularly template-resistant. But once you learn to look for the solid shapes within a design, marking with templates is a breeze.

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Indispensable Tips for Precision Quilt Piecing, Part 4: Pressing

2/8/2017

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Part 4 in a series. Click here for Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

Ironing used to be a big thing. Back in the day, my mother had a huge basket of weekly ironing. It included not only my Dad's white work shirts, which she starched, but his cotton boxer shorts (which, presumably, she did not).

Ironing clothes is high on my list of truly odious domestic chores. Ah, but ironing fabric yardage is another game altogether, and one of my favorite phases of the quilt making process. That brings me to my first tip for this week, which is actually not a tip so much as a rule.

Always press before cutting.

To pre-wash or not to pre-wash? Both approaches have their adherents. Personally, I'm a dedicated pre-washer. For one thing, washing every bit of fabric before it enters my stash means ironing it, which means spreading it out on my ironing board, caressing it, examining it, admiring it .... Fellow fabric-lovers, you know what I'm talking about.

So the fabric gets washed, then ironed, then folded and filed away. Sometime later (maybe years later), it comes back into the light of day to be cut.

At this point, those storage folds are persistent creases. If I'm cutting a strip across the whole width, I don't have to unfold it, so that's fine. But as soon as I need to unfold to make a cut, those creases have got to be pressed out.

For scraps, which may have been sitting in a big crumpled jumble in a bag, the pre-cut pressing is even more urgent.

Sure, it all gets flattened under your transparent ruler, right? Not good enough. Press it.

Always press seams before sewing across them.

Some quilters like to keep a small ironing table right next to their machines so they don't have to keep jumping up to go to the ironing board. Being a fidgety type, I prefer the variety of sit-to-sew, stand-to-press. Either way, don't skip pressing your pieced strips before joining them to the next patch. Finger pressing doesn't do it. You need that whole strip nice and flat. See Part 2, Aligning, to understand why.

Press seams to one side.

Does this really need to be said? Don't all quilters press their seams to one side? Actually, not. There are a few mavericks out there who press seams open. I suppose there may be occasions when it helps to distribute bulk, but it places more stress on the seam, and shortens the life of the quilt.

Press seams towards the darker fabric.

The reason usually given for this rule is that the seam allowances won't show through the darker fabric. That's true. More importantly, habitually pressing towards the darker fabric will almost always keep your seam allowances leaning in opposite directions when joining two pieced strips.

Patchwork quilting depends on value contrast for its effect. It's the contrast of relative light and dark between two adjacent patches that makes them appear as distinct shapes.

The 9-Patch block at the left uses high value contrast between each adjacent square, creating a clear checkerboard effect. If all the seam in the block are pressed towards the darker fabric, the directions of the seam allowances will alternate.

Of course, there are exceptions. The next pressing tip overrides this one.

Press seams away from greater bulk.

Look what happens when your simple 9-Patch block adds a few half-square triangles (HSTs) and turns into a Shoo Fly block.

If you press both the bias seams and the straight seams towards the darker fabric, you'll get a concentration of seam allowance bulk right in the triangle corners. That's going to wreak havoc with your quest for perfect points.

Since you'll be sewing and pressing the HSTs first, you'll probably press the bias seams toward the dark, then press the straight seams towards the light. No problem, until it's time to join the top and bottom strips to the center strip. If you followed the rule and pressed those seams towards the center dark square, the seam allowances won't alternate.

For this, we need one more tip ...

Plan ahead.

The more complex your quilt block, the more certain you are to encounter seam allowance conflicts. Before you set up your assembly line, sew and press one complete block to work out your seam allowance strategy. Then apply that consistently to each component of each successive block.

Make yourself a quilt-worthy ironing board.

Standard ironing boards are designed for ironing clothes. They're just not big enough to spread out an entire 45-inch width of quilters' cotton. Plus, they offer very limited real estate for stacking the dozens of fabrics I pull out of stash to audition for a new quilt. For that, I needed a board big enough to land a jet, so I made my own.

Here's my everything-at-a glance schematic of how it's done.

I made mine 24 x 60 inches. You can make yours a bit bigger or smaller if you like. Much bigger will start to become unsteady, perched on top of your regular ironing board.

The lengths of lumber that surround the ironing board to hold it in place can be any old thing, as long as it's about 1 inch thick. Cut them anywhere from 6 to 12 inches long. Carpenters wood glue will hold them in place without nails or screws, but the nails/screws hold them steady while the glue dries. Be sure your nails/screws aren't long enough to go all the way through the board!

To staple the cover to the board, spread your fabric and batting on the floor and lay the board on top of it, then fold the cover around the board and staple.

I've seen the suggestion that 1-inch gingham check makes a good cover. Not a bad idea, but know that (a) the checks aren't actually 1 inch, (b) the checks aren't square and (c) the gingham you'll find among the quilters' cottons is not generally a sturdy fabric.