How to Quilt as you go: Easy Cover Strip Method by Monica Poole

[Music] hi there i'm monica poole welcome to the pattern pool studio i've been designing cool did you go quilt since 2002 i've taught and lectured all over australia and i also have a very large range of cruelty to go patterns in this video i'm excited to share with you how i make my cruelty go quilts using an easy cover strip method so why cool did you go i started my career off as a fashion designer and then one day i came across a quilting store and i thought wow i'm going to make a quilt so i did what everybody does when they're new to quilting i made the biggest quilt i could find and look i loved you know working on the top doing the piecing and the applique but what i didn't like is having to get down on the ground and safety pin that big quilt together and then try and get that quilt through my domestic sewing machine being a young mom i couldn't afford to have my quilt top sent away to be quilted so i had to get resourceful just like my mother and my grandmother who were also dressmakers and designers before me so i decided to design my quilts break them up into small sections quilt them and then join them together the easy cover strip is my favorite method because it's fully machine sewn and it makes great fun modern quilts so on this quilt here you'll notice the strips running in between the blocks that's our cover strip and now i'm going to show you how i do it the most important thing about this method is that the batting is always cut half an inch smaller all the way around the edge of your backing fabric and your top layer use a nice flat low loft batting this method works great with stitching and flipping you can do crazy patchwork or stitch and flip strips onto your batting and backing square this technique also works really well for applique so once you have your backing fabric and then your batting half an inch smaller around the edge you can place your top layer on top and you can quilt all the way from edge to edge in any way you like straight lines going across or down or free motion stippling for the backing fabric choose a small to medium all over print and avoid using stripes and directional prints it's also a great way to use up your stash by using different backing fabrics and you can also make your quilts reversible to join your blocks together place them back to back and then we're going to sew the seam with a 3 8 of an inch seam allowance the next step is to iron that seam open and the reason why we take a 3 8 of an inch seam allowance is because that will sit nice and flat here's our 3 8 of an inch seam allowance sitting nice and flat on the top on the back you can see it's nice and neat and on the top we have our raw seam that we're going to cover with the strip our cover strip is just a two inch strip made up with a one inch bias tape maker now although we're using a bias maker your strips don't have to be cut on the bias grain i just cut them across the fabric from selvage to selvage and in any of my patterns i tell you how many strips to cut i'll then say join them all together end to end to make one long continuous length and then we're going to run them through with the bias maker to prepare your strip with the bias maker first of all cut it into a point now thread your strip through the bias maker normally there's a plastic side on top and with a little channel so just use a pin to help slide that out through the channel i always like to start with a little bit like an inch there like that and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to tilt my bias maker up like that and bring the iron onto it so it's a slide and then bringing the iron onto it working in small sections as you go to apply the cover strip you could either hold it in place with some roxanne's glue base or you can use a strip of fusible web i'm going to use a strip of fusible web it's cut three quarters of an inch wide and i'm going to iron the rough side onto the wrong side of my cover strip cut your strips so that it's half an inch shorter at the top and half an inch shorter at the bottom what that's going to do is reduce the bulk in your seams that run across ways to make sure that your strip is going to be perfectly straight and centered mark a line that's half an inch away from the center of the seam just along one side using a fabric marker that can be easily erased from your fabric now peel away the paper backing and iron your cover strip over the top of the raw seam aligning one side up with the marked line [Music] a tip with the frayed edges is don't trim them away just scoop them underneath the cover strip with your scissors to attach the cover strip stitch nice and close to the edge on either side here's a tip for stitching close to the edge of the tram you may have a foot that looks something like this with a guide in the middle you may also have a stitch in the ditch foot for your walking foot all you have to do is line that guide up on the edge of the tram and if you can move your needle position over so that you're sewing probably about a sixteenth of an inch away from the edge of the tram that'll be quite perfect i'm going to show you how i do that now start sewing right at the top above the tram with the reverse stitch and then you can see as i'm sewing along i'm using that guide to run along the edge of the tram and that way i'm going to be sewing nice and close to the edge if you don't have a guide like this it's not too hard to just judge that by eye do a reverse stitch at the end and now sew down the other side and this is what our cover strip looks like on the top and on the back it looks like quilting lines sewn half an inch away from the seam you can also see that the cover strip is not thick and bulky [Music] to continue joining your quilt together join the blocks together to make rows by sewing on the short trams and then when you join the rows together build upon your quilt so join row one and row two together sew on a tram then row three sew on a trim so work from the top down that way if you join half the quilt together and the other half the quilt together you then have to sew through the center so you've just defeated the whole purpose of quilt as you go but by working in row by row and joining your quilt together in that way you'll only ever be sewing about this far away from the edge of your quilt and look i do say yes if you are making a king size quilt it is going to get heavy at the end but at least you haven't had to have wrestled with your quilt during that whole curl to go process great news i've put five of my favorite quilted go patterns into an e-book that you can download and start sewing today each of the quilts in the e-book has a different technique this is the miss daisy quilt she's got an improv flower design this is the rainbow quilt that i've made with applique curves which i've stitched using machine embroidery and bias with also some rickrack and some braid the hummingbird quilt is a stitch and flip design this one is also reversible the fancy free quilt is a stack and whack design that is perfect for fat quarters i've also used some fun rickrack and some twisty quilting and you can see it's another nice reversible one last of all we've got the c spray quilt this is another stitch and flip design that's been made in long panels and then it's got separate panels of circle borders which i've made using sketchy applique you may also have noticed my one inch wide binding that's fully machine sewn and it ties in with the width of the one inch wide trans you'll also find the instructions for that in the book the book is called quilt as you go with the easy cover strip method and it's available to download on our website now thanks for watching you can find us on facebook instagram and youtube just search patternpool and we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Pattern Poole TV

Views: 87,614

Rating: 4.9599767 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, quilt as you go, monica poole, bias maker, pattern poole applique, how to quilt, modern quilts, quilting

Id: xsRmMDkZGx0

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020