Hand Quilting without Marking

hi I'm Wendy from Shiny Happy World and this is the second of three videos about hand quilting in the first video I showed the tools and supplies that you need and the basic hand quilting Stitch technique in this one I'm going to show you some ways to make more intricate hand quilting without having to do any marking on your quilt first I want to show you what I mean by more intricate things so you can just do simple quilting in ditch along the seam lines but one of the things that's really nice about hand quilting is you can do more intricate curves and things than you can do with a walking foot on the sewing machine so for example this is called Orange Peel there's a circle here and then there's a half circle here that halfway overlaps it in each quarter so you get these wedge pieces that form a circle and I've got a circle in each of these squares and then half circles that overlap the seams between the squares that's something that would be more difficult to do on a sewing machine unless you're doing free motion quilting um over in here you can barely see it because this is such a heavily patterned fabric but you can see that I've got some kind of basket weave Stripes going on and here I've got some fans and um someplace else in the quilt I have some Stars you can do a lot of different patterns with the hand quilting here you can see I've got some diamonds uh two concentric diamonds with a circle in the middle of it you can have a lot of fun with it traditionally people will mark on the quilts first you can have a stencil and pounce on it with chalk dust or there are various kinds of markers and things that will erase I don't like to mark on my quilts if I marked the whole quilt first it takes me so long to hand quilt that any chalk marks would disappear long before I got to them and anything where I draw on a finished quilt makes me very very nervous so I like to do things where I don't mark on the quilt first and for that I use a couple of different tools for straight lines I use tape and for any kind of curved shapes I use felt so I'm going to show you the tape first I like using painters tape it uh has a little bit less stickiness than a regular masking tape although I've used masking tape as well and what you're going to do is lay it down and then quilt along the edge of it so I've drawn some grid lines on here so we can imagine that these are quilt blocks I wanted to show it to you on a solid muslin background so the quiles so the stitches would really show up so we're going to have to pretend that we have some quilting lines and what you can do with the tape is basically connect the intersections I didn't tear this piece quite long enough but you can stick it down and then quilt along the edge of it and I'm going to show you that one thing to be aware of is I can only quilt toward myself and I'm right-handed so I always want the tape to sit on the right hand side of the line that I'm going to quilt if you're left-handed you're going to want it on the other side but basically well I'll just show you and then you can see what I'm talking about I'm going to shift over to a chair because I'm used to quilting sitting down and that's going to make things a little bit easier for me okay so I'm just going to start in the middle here cuz I'm not going to quilt that whole line that would be a very long video so I'm starting my I've got a knot in the end of my thread here so I'm burying the needle remember I ran the needle through between the two layers pull it until that knot is right on the surface and then give it a little tug and it comes through and now I'm just going to do the regular quilting Stitch and I'm going to do it right along the edge of the tape oops push that through too far and you can see I'm pushing down on the tape here that's why I want the tape on the right hand side because I'm pushing down on it and if I were pushing down on the left hand side I would be tending to push the fabric away from the tape by pushing down on the tape side I'm pushing the fabric and the tape together so it's just a little tip but uh it makes it much more successful and you can reuse the strip of tape a few times before it loses all of its stick keep doing that and then you just do regular stitches I want to show you this little trick one of the nice things about these rubber Thimbles is if you've just been using lotion on your hands it might your your hands might slip off you've got a very short needle and very little space to grab especially if you load a lot of stitches on and one thing that can be nice is you can use the rubbery side of that thimble to grab your needle and it just gives you a little extra grab so I'm going to cut this off and then show you um how to use the felt for curved lines so I'm going to peel this off and you can see you get a nice perfectly straight line I use tape for any straight lines that I want to Mark it's a great way to get uh things lined up with the intersections and then depending you can use different widths of tape and then you could set the next line of tap tape a tape width apart from this one and get perfectly evenly spaced parallel lines it's very handy to have a whole stash of tape in different widths if you like to do a lot of straight lines and with straight lines you can do diamonds you can do um parallel lines you can do grids you can do um stars all kinds of different shapes but sometimes you want to have curves and for Curves I like to cut a template out of felt and then I just pin it to the quilt I use these bent um basting pens they're really handy for all of my anytime I'm pinning things to a quilt so I've got that pinned down and then you can just quilt around that shape so you could do circles you could do hearts you could do big chunky letters if you wanted to don't do anything too detailed because when it's covering the whole quilt you're going to really lose a lot of that detail but simple shapes are fantastic for this you can even do um you can cut like a rick R kind of piece and do some wavy lines anything that's a curve you can cut out a felt and use that as your pattern so I'm going to just going to do a little bit of stitching around that curve again we're not going to do a ton of it but we're going to do just a little bit of it first let me bury my needle here then I'm going to move to a chair so I can quilt a little more comfortably okay so I've got my thread already buried and now I'm just going to do the same thing I did with the tape work whichever direction around the circle for me that's counterclockwise is going to give me let my thumb be pressing down on the the felt piece but if you're left-handed you're going to want to work your way clockwise around so that you're doing the same thing whoops and I just pulled that thread out when that happens you really need to just clip off that knot and start again um if you tried to pull it through you risk tearing that fabric from that row of stitches it's only going to do it on your first stitch on your first kind of gathering of stitches so let's just start over again hold that it happens most often if I don't catch the batting in there if I just go if I go underneath this top layer of fabric and above the batting so you want to try and get the batting in there too the batting is what's going to grab the knot a little more effectively okay that feels a little that's going to stick so we're just going to do those stitches again just going nice and slow you'll get faster at it the more you do it I'm just going nice and slow so so that you guys can see everything clearly and you just work your way around that Circle oops sometimes it'll hook on your basting pans you can unhook it pretty easily and then let's take this off and you can see I've got a nice curve going there you just work that all the way around the circle and then you could scatter different circles different places on the quilt or other shape or overlap them strategically and end up with a really nice curved design so that's it I use masking tape to Mark any straight lines that I want to quilt and felt to Mark any curved lines that I want a quilt with those with a combination of those two things you can do just about any design you want without ever having to draw on your quilt and worrying about whether those marks are going to come out later in the next video I'm going to show you how to do big Stitch quilting which is really really fun I'm Wendy from Shiny Happy World I'll see you next time

Channel: Wendi Gratz

Views: 75,645

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Id: oJPZqkBMWW0

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2016