Hand Quilting Tutorial

alright I'm excited to chat with you about hand quilting and to get started we're gonna talk about the tools and supplies that you need there is a link on this video where you can buy all of this on Amazon and also a free PDF download where you can get all the supplies that I talked about so first of all you're gonna want an embroidery needle and I have two different types here just to give you an idea this is founds importer they're all size five embroidery needles and these I actually really love there's the clover brand embroidery needle they come in sizes 9 3 through 9 and they kind of pyramid up I've used a lot as you can see and I don't know I think three might be smaller 9 is bigger I know that I end up liking about size 5 so that's why I go with these but any embroidery needle will do then you're gonna want a Hera marker you're gonna want a ruler and you're definitely gonna want a symbol this is my favorite it's the Dritz brand some people love a leather symbol this one's a bit big it's size medium and sometimes it slips off my finger so that's why I like the Dritz one and then I love to have a needle puller it's rubber and it just when you're pulling the needle out sometimes it gets kind of tricky so there's a little bit of rubber there it helps really grab that needle and pull it out so the fingers look lovely as you're going and then you're also going to want to have a pair of scissors close by these are extra cute and small any scissors will do but you're gonna want to snip your thread then let's chat about the thread that you're gonna want to use this is embroidery number eight DMC brand pearl cotton and as you can see I have a whole bucket of it and just to show you this is what I normally am quilting with on my machine it's a lot thinner and so the number eight is a lot thicker and I just love the look that it gives that's what makes hand quilting so wonderful is the thread now I will say the quilt I'm working on I just happen to have this on hand I don't know where I even got it but it says its size 20 so it's actually a little bit thinner than the size 8 which sounds funny the higher the number the thinner the thread thread so you can see that it's a little bit thinner but that's what I happened to be using on this project only because the color was perfect it went really well with this but normally what I use and recommend is the DMC number 8 so with all of these tools let's go ahead and jump in how to get started so what you're gonna want to do first is decide where you want to do your hand quilting if different for every quilt there's really no right or wrong and if you get started and you don't love how it looks it's super easy to unpick in fact I will show you right here let's say I don't love this look I'm just gonna go like this and unpick it and it's done but how I decided on this particular quilt was when I stood back and looked at it my eyes were drawn to this white shape right here but given the design of the quilt with square square square I wanted this square right here to stand out so I knew that if I hand quilted a square right here it would stop the eye from seeing this shape so that's how I decided for this a little bit more of the thread coming out there so once you've decided on the shape that you want for your hand quilting that's when the Hera marker and the ruler come into place so just kind of eyeballing it I knew I wanted the square to be about this measurement away from the sides so now I would grab my ruler and just kind of see okay how far about is that oh it's about an inch okay we'll go with an inch so I would find the one inch mark on my ruler and line that up with this edge right here so I'm gonna go ahead and do that and you can see that I'm going to tug the quilt it's not totally perfect that's fine you can like I just did just tug the fabric underneath to get it to be as straight as you can and if it's not totally straight it's okay so now with this lined up I'm gonna take my hair marker which is just a dull plastic tool I don't know how to call it and I'm going to firmly press down the ruler you want to be on a hard surface underneath I tried doing this on a soft surface and it doesn't leave a nice mark for you so with that held we're gonna press very firmly go from side to side and remove it and I even went a little over it's fine because this will once I'm done and I throw it in the wash that'll disappear so I've got my line there in fact you can see I've done this ahead of time but I'll do it again so I take that 1 inch line line it up on this side and with that in place mark it go over here again the 1 inch line line it up press really hard and then the last side now this thing I know is not very even with my sewing the line comes up so I'm just gonna go from corner to corner on the one inch line you'll see the fabric comes up a little bit it's okay it's okay okay and you will notice that I went from this line to this line to draw my line again here here I did that on purpose so that you can see the corners that you want to sew to hand quilt to I mean if I wanted to I could stop but it's just easier to go from side to side side to side so with that now we want to get our thread and our needle ready which I did forget to mention but that's okay I'll mention now that you're all so it's handy you don't have to have but it's handy to have a needle threader and how that works is instead of taking your thread and putting it through the eye of the needle you're gonna take your needle threader and you're gonna put that through just like you would your thread but it's a lot easier to put through so now you can see the needle is hanging on to this needle threader and now I'm gonna set that down I'm gonna get the thread so I just kind of loosely lay out how much thread I'm gonna need I go over the area this will leave you with a little bit extra especially if you leave a little extra on the sides so I'll leave some extra trim that now with the thread the part of the needle threader that is sticking out from the needle you put the thread through and that's like a much bigger hole than I of the needle it's it's own little eye but it's a lot bigger pull it tight and then you take the needle and just pull it off and sometimes you have to tug a little hard there we go and then hmm take the thread out of the needle threader and it's threaded for you so pretty nifty with that threaded you only want a single thread you don't want to double double up your thread you want to leave a little tail here obviously but just a single knot so just tie single knot nothing fancy with that tied I also like to trim the tail of the thread so that that's in the way and now we are ready to get started so this is the corner I'm gonna start on because I'm right-handed I am going to hand quilt from let me think here from right to left so grabbing the quilt like an oven mitt if you've ever used an oven mitt to grab something out of the oven you just grab it with your hands like this that's how I want to grab the quilt so I'm gonna go with my left hand that I'm not hand quilting with go underneath and I'll show you right here I'm going to grab it like an oven mitt so that it's in between my thumb in my hands so I don't use an embroidery hoop because I've already granted I've already quilted this but normally I will just baste pin-based my quilt so that it's held together so I don't use a hoop because the quilts already being held together and this I've already actually machine quilted across these lines right here you can't really see it I hit it a little bit I wanted the hand quilting to really pop but I have machine quilted it which is why you don't see any pins basting it together it's already sewn together so with my left hand I'm gonna come underneath and I'm going to grab the quilt right here you can see my thumb is right here and my fingers are over here and I'm gonna grab it like an oven mitt and this is the corner that I want to start on so I'm gonna go a little bit out from that put in the needle only through the top layer so I'm not gonna go through the batting or the backing and then I'm gonna bring the needle right to the corner I'm gonna set it down this I use both hands because you have to tug a little bit now as you go it's naturally gonna stop right here because you have the knot but you don't want the knot to show so you just take it and give it a little tug and there you go now it's hidden and if you give it a little bit gentle a tug it's fine it's gonna stay there sometimes I get a little aggressive or for whatever reason it comes all the way out and oh no that's okay we just go back do the same thing this time I'm going to start it in that same area I can see the hole where I put it at originally and find a different spot just slightly to the side where the thread hasn't come through yet and that way the knot will go through this beginning part more easily because it already got pulled through there but it'll be a little bit trickier to go through that second part because it hasn't been pulled through that yet and there we go so now that it's ready to go we've popped that we're just ready to go along I'm going to bring my left hand again like an oven mitt and kind of grasp the quilt and you'll want to feel a motion of just in and out and in and out and I at this point you want to go through all three layers so I don't worry so much about the length at this point what I really concentrate on is keeping the needle in line with that marker that I made with the HERA marker so let me show you here as the needle comes out I'm gonna make sure that it's staying in line with that hair marker line and I usually do in fact I need to get my cymbal on and my needle gripper I can go up until that point just fine but after that I need to push the needle in and you're gonna want your thimble so push it in pull it out and there's my first two stitches and as I go my hand just keeps sliding down like the oven mitt thing and again making sure that I'm on that line that I made with the hair marker gonna go through and pull it through now as I'm going on the back side when the needle comes through I can sense where it is with my middle finger and I can kind of so obviously I don't poke my finger with the needle but once it's gone through and I know that I've poked it through my middle finger comes and kind of feels where it is and helps to guide it I move that out of the way helps to guide it to come back up so I'll talk you through it I've poked this through and now I middle finger comes and feels the needle and helps to kind of find its way back up so I poke through obviously move my fingers out of the way once it's through and I safely know where it is my fingers come and help to guide it back up and there we go so my first stitches are going smoothly now I'm just going to pretend like I've made it to this corner and it's time to turn all I do is take the quilt and turn it so that again I'm hand quilting from right to left and if you're left-handed it would be just the opposite and again my hand comes underneath and I would just keep going along that way now when you get to the end we'll pretend that I am finishing I am just going to tie a single knot but I'm gonna want it to be about right here long enough that I'll have another stitch but a little further out so that we can hide the knot so I'm gonna go ahead I usually so the knot so make a hole go through and then I just let's say I go to about here you can hold the thread there and pull it I'm not working right now of course there we and it's actually a little further away than I'd hoped but it's better further away than closer because what you do is this time again when you're finishing and ending you only go through the top layer so I just go to the top layer and then I pull my needle far far away sounds like a fairy tale far away and back out through the fabric it doesn't matter where this is simply to hide your thread so there you go it's stopping right there because there's a knot so I'm just gonna tug it again and it popped and now it's hidden and so now I can take my scissors trim that and hide it and there you go that is how you do hand quilting so if you have any questions please leave a comment I will also say sometimes when I'm quilting and pulling the thread through it gets into a little bit of a knot you know that's totally fine take your time there's no not that well Never Say Never but I've never come across a knot and I've come across some bad ones but that can't be untied worst case scenario like I showed you at the beginning you just unpick and go back but I've never had to do that because of a knot so there we are thanks so much for joining me on this hand quilting tutorial

Channel: Elizabeth Chappell

Views: 41,858

Rating: 4.9155278 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie

Id: LrjP_kP93XQ

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019