Four Basic Quilting Tips

[Music] there are some basic tips that every quilter needs to know when it comes to sewing blocks together and pieces together to get better accuracy when they're piecing some of the things i'm going to talk about are your ruler using your ruler good tools you want to use i'm going to talk about some pins i'm going to talk about getting a good accurate quarter inch seam allowance i know some people talk about this scant quarter inch but everybody has a different definition of what a scant quarter inch is so it's real difficult to tell you exactly what a scant quarter inch is and i'm going to talk about some tools that i use to get my piecing to be more accurate okay so the first thing i want to talk about is your the use of your ruler and it's real important to use the lines of your ruler pop properly so when you're using your ruler you always want to include the very thin line that you're cutting that you're using to measure with so i would include this line my fabric would be right up to the edge of that line and it wouldn't go over that line it wouldn't be in front of the line so just be sure you cover that line when you're cutting your strips the next thing is you want to make sure when you're piecing things that you have an accurate quarter inch now i talk about an accurate quarter inch because that's a mathematical term a scant quarter inch isn't a mathematical term so it's difficult everybody's different definition of a scant quarter inch is different some people say it's a threads width some people say it's two threads with some people say it's a smidge so we don't know what that means so i'm going to show you how i get an accurate quarter inch on all of my sewing machines because if you can establish it on all of your sewing machines you can move back and forth to different sewing machines the feet on the quarter inch feet on some sewing machines is different from a quarter inch feet on other sewing machines so even the quarter inch foot that you might use might be different so this way you can set up all of your machines to be the same the first thing i do is i'm i use my regular sewing foot which i have on this machine here and then i move my needle all the way to the right and the re i'm going to explain why i do this and there's a couple reasons why okay so i've moved my needle all the way to the right and then i take a ruler or a special tool now i have a little ruler here myself that's of course got my name on it but you don't have to use a ruler like this you can use your regular ruler and you're going with my ruler i'm going to put the needle right in this hole which is at an exact quarter inch now if you're using a regular ruler you'll just use that quarter inch line to get your needle on top of but i'm just going to put my needle right in that quarter inch hole i'm going to lower my foot and then i'm going to set what i call my little shelf or a fence as they call it in woodworking it's called a fence i'm just going to use i use dr scholl's mole foam foot pads and i cut them into little strips and i'm just going to take the backing off of it and i'm going to set it right next to my ruler if i can get the backing off of it okay there we go and i'm going to set that just so it hugs that ruler just like this okay so now i have take my pick my needle up and move my ruler out of the way and now when i put my foot down there's a little ledge a little edge or space between the foot and this little pad that i have here so that i can see where the edge of my fabric is if i can see where the edge of my fabric is then i know i'm going to be at a quarter of inch every time i sew so let's sew some strips together i've got three sets of strips here at two and a half inches and i'm going to sew them together and you want to make sure that you line them up nice and even a lot of times people will bring their blocks to me and ask me well why didn't it match and i'll look on the back and i'll notice that their fabric is not lined up if you can see one of the fabrics either on top or on the bottom then your fabric's not lined up so i always make sure that my fabric is lined up perfectly when i go to sew and then i'm going to set it in my machine and i'm going to have it touching that piece of foam and when it's touching that foam i know it's going to be at a quarter of an inch seam allowance so i'm going to sew and i do shorten my stitch just a little bit because i i don't i like the a little tighter stitch maybe a 2 or a 1.8 and i'm going to sew and as i'm sewing i'm going to check underneath to make sure that everything's lined up and i don't have my fabric hasn't moved on me so i'm going to continue to sew until i get to the end making sure that my edges are completely lined up and once i get to the end and i'm always kind of guiding the fabric so that it touches that little piece of foam so you can see here i have a nice even quarter inch seam allowance it's even from the top all the way to the bottom okay so now the next step is i want to press it now ashley talked about setting your seam so you always want to set it with a hot iron i don't usually use steam in my iron i think that steam sometimes distorts your fabric so i use just a hot iron and i'm going to finger press it in the direction i want it to go because when you finger press you can feel if your seam is laying nice and flat okay if you take it to the iron right now and you don't finger press it first you might end up with a pleat in there so now that i've pressed it with my finger i'm going to go ahead and press it with the iron now when you're pressing it with an iron make sure that you press it so it's straight a lot of times when you press long strips you end up it gets distorted because it's not straight on your ironing board so if you if it looks like this as you're pressing it it's going to end up being like that so i want to make sure that it's straight when i press it and i press it in the direction that my seam is going i don't iron it back and forth because that's called ironing when we quilt it's called pressing okay so i've pressed it okay now i'm going to um sew my a third strip on and then i'm going to measure that center to see if i have a two inch strip two inch finished section when i'm done okay so again i'm going to line my edges up just right set it under the foot so that it's touching that piece of foam and then i'm going to sew i'm going to stop if i see that the fabric edges are coming apart i might check underneath to make sure the edges are still even okay and then i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to set my seam with hot iron i'm going to finger press it now i'm finger pressing towards the dark but sometimes you can't always finger press towards the dark and then i'm going to press it with the iron make sure that my strip stays flat and straight and now i'm going to measure that center section that center section since these were two and a half inch strips should equal two inches so this will tell me whether i've set my mole foam in the right place so let me look here and i'm at exactly two inches so i know my seam is set right i know my mole foam is in the right place and i know i'm going to have that perfect quarter inch every time i sew another thing that's important when sewing is you want to make sure you use a good rotary cutter with a nice sharp blade you want to loosen that blade just a little bit if it's too tight it's going to be you're going to spend a lot of energy cutting so you want to loosen it just a little bit make sure your wheel runs nice and smooth and always have a sharp blade the other thing is is pins you want to make sure you have a nice sharp pin and i always recommend a pin that's 0.5 millimeters or smaller so these are 0.4 millimeter pins they're best for working with batiks because you don't want to make big holes in your batiks so 0.5 or 0.4 a lot of times you'll buy pins they don't have a label on them they might not say how big they are so make sure that it tells you the size it doesn't make any difference how long they are but you want to make sure you get a size the size of the pin is listed on the package so if you follow all of these tips you're definitely going to get better results in your quilting your blocks are going to fit together better and you're going to be much happier with the end result

Channel: National Quilters Circle

Views: 8,530

Rating: 4.9354839 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, quilting tips, quilt, quilt tips, sew, sew quilts, sewing, quilt patterns, quilt projects, quilting projects, quilting patterns, national quilters circle, nqc, quilter, quilting videos, quilt videos, quilting how to, stitching, learn to quilt, quilting class, quilt class

Id: _G4ac89thWA

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021