How to Quilt By Hand and Baste- Crafty Gemini Tutorial

hey it's Vanessa the crafty Gemini and in this video tutorial I'm gonna teach you how to take a quilt block and turn it into a mini quilt with some big stitch hand quilting to turn our little quilt block into a mini quilt here are the supplies that you're going to need a piece of backing fabric that's a little bit bigger doesn't have to be perfect just something that extends past because after it's all quilted we'll be trimming it down to size you just want excess on all four sides of the block and then you're going to need some batting and there are like a million different types of batting's out there for a mini quilt I'm not too picky typically you'll see mostly in your fabric stores you'll find 100% polyester 100% cotton or a blend of the two usually about an 80% cotton 20 percent polyester mix whatever batting you have on hand will work fine if you don't have batting you can use fusible fleece whatever it is this is not really going to be a big quilt that people are going to be using if it's just for decoration any batting scraps that you have on hand will come in handy alright so I'm laying my block on top of the batting and notice again I'm leaving a little excess and I'm just going to roughly cut around this doesn't have to be perfect I just need a piece that's going to cover the entire block that I want to turn into a mini quilt so now we have what we call the three layers of our quilt sandwich we have the quilt top the batting and the backing and keep in mind that whether you're working on a small wall hanging kind of mini quilt like this or a really large quilt for your bed you're always going to have the same sandwich top batting and backing now once your quilt sandwich is in place you need to baste the three layers together so they don't move for when you have to go in and quilt it whether by hand or by machine so I'm going to share with you a few of the probably most popular ways to base there are ton of techniques out there and really I encourage you to play around with some different ones and see what you think works for you the first and probably the most known out there is pin basting now these are regular big safety pins they also sell some like curved ones that are easier for you to get through all three layers and so the idea is that you put the pin through all three layers so that you're holding the quilt sandwich together and then you go through and you pin them close okay there's all kinds of gadgets that help you kind of close them faster because if you're working on a really big quilt you're going to need a ton of these safety pins but then as you're quilting you'll then have to go in and remove them as you go I find that too cumbersome and I don't have that many pins I'm just not interested in that technique another option that I sometimes will use is a temporary spray adhesive and I use sulky KK mm if you're interested in trying this I'll include a link in the description box below the idea is that you of course in a well-ventilated area will spray the back of your Patrick pieces and then you just smooth it out onto the batting and it just creates like this little layer of a temporary adhesive film and it sticks to the batting then you repeat that on the backing side to this side as well and then all your three layers will be contained together so that's always an option however on a lot of my projects I find myself hand basting more and more often because I think it's easier and it's just super simple to do a lot of people think oh no she's grabbing a hand sewing needle and some thread I'm not into that but I'm going to show you super easy and super quick I just grab a contrasting thread it doesn't have to be any fancy specific thread just any all purpose thread you have on hand in a contrasting color because you want to be able to see it on your background so you know to avoid it when you're quilting I just cut a piece of that thread and I thread it through the needle I you don't even have to tie a knot or anything now we're going to come here and I typically start kind of close to the edge so that I make sure that all the four edges are really nice and basted down so I don't get any of this lifting up okay so we're going to start at the top and you're going to push the needle through all the layers okay you want to go through all three because that's the idea we want to hold all the three layers of the quilt sandwich together and then I'm just going to come back up to the top and I usually space this about 1/2 of an inch from where I went in to where I come out with the needle now you're just going to pull that needle don't pull it all the way since we have no knot on the end and I just leave a little tail there and I'll go right back in and do the same stitch that I just did underneath it and that typically helps secure it because you see that I still have this little tail sticking out just don't pull it too hard otherwise you'll pull the whole thing through but leave it like that that's enough to have it secured then I come about four fingers down from when I just went in and I'll do another stitch like that so just into the fabric and come back up making sure you want to feel the table that you're working on when you go in with the needle that makes sure that you're going through all three layers and you can see my little stitch right there come up and do the same thing you just work your way about the same distance continuing down you know for whatever the size of your project is now you can see that I still have thread left even though I've come to the end so what I do is I just turn this come down about the same distance take another stitch same thing here okay and I still have threads so I'm going to keep working my way around and you can see I mean literally it just takes seconds seconds and when you get to the end and you just want to hold it into place since we have no knot I'll simply just come in and do two stitches one and two the same way that we started it here and that is enough to anchor it into place our little mini quilt has been basted okay all three layers are nice and put together and what you should see is just kind of these long stitches on the front side and when you flip it over you can hardly see anything there's just a few little stitches just of where we went in the fabric and came up again but making sure to grab all three layers and if you're wondering about the fact that I didn't put any basting stitches in the Scent you remember this is such a small project if you flip it over and you're a little hesitant about how there's no stitches in the center grab it and see you can see that it lays nice and smooth as long as that fabric was smooth when you went through and hand basted it it's going to hold it in place the idea is we want to keep three layers the three layers of the sandwich together as we go through and quilt because our quilting stitches whether by hand or by machine are going to further hold the sandwich together and then at that point we won't need these hand basting stitches any longer and because they're super long stitches like this at that point you'll be able to literally just grab the thread and pull it out and it'll come out like that now let's talk about quilting the quilt oK we've layered the sandwich we basted it together now it's ready for the decorative quilting stitches now quilting is the act of stitching somehow through all three of these layers okay through the quilt sandwich but quilting is also the art of making quilts right so sometimes beginners get confused with that so when I talk about quilting now that means what am I going to do to stitch through all these three layers to add a decorative touch to finish it off and to make it exactly how I want it to be with the textured stitches whether it's on a long-arm machine or with some hand quilting stitches now for the purposes of this video I'm going to teach you how to do what they call big stitch hand quilting which is one of my favorite ways to hand quilt because it goes a lot faster than traditional hand quilting not for the quilting part of making this little mini coat we're going to hand quilt it and for thread you can really use any thread that you want the thicker the thread the more pronounced the stitches are going to be like the more they're going to pop and then of course dependent on the color of the thread that you use you can either have a thread color that blends into the background fabric or the patchwork doesn't matter which wherever you want to quilt it then you're going to need a needle now the basic things you want to keep in mind for the type of needle that you use is it needs to be a needle that has a sharp point because remember it needs to go through all three layers and it needs to be a needle that has a needle I large enough to fit whatever thickness of thread you're using I typically will use a size 22 chenille needle some people have a tough time pushing these through the fabric this is what works for me so again just be mindful you know kind of play around with a few different options and see what works for you so I'm going to use a 22 chenille some other options on the market are like Sashi cone Eagles that you can get out there these are super super sharp do not play around with these things they're very very sharp I've poked myself plenty of times and they're quite big you see that they come in different sizes but again the 22 chenille needle is my go-to remember that any of the supplies that I feature in this video will be linked for you in the description box below this video on youtube okay we have thread we have a needle and we have a symbol some people wear thimbles some people don't this is the one that I prefer for a couple of different reasons it's metal it has a little lip here that I can get under and push that needle through especially when you're quilting through three layers of fabric and batting it comes in really handy and then also if you have cute manicured nails or long nails it's not completely contained so you can have your nail sticking out here without interfering with your hand quilting okay so just some things to keep in mind now the thread that we're going to be using here is a twelve weight cotton remember with thread the higher the weight of the thread the thinner it is so a hundred weight thread is going to be almost invisible this is a twelve weight so it's significantly thicker and it's actually the equivalent of two strands of embroidery floss okay so keep that in mind this is the thread that I prefer to use and this also happens to be my thread collection that I collaborated with sulky threads on it's called crafty Gemini's favorites and it features all these six spools and the colors you see here I love this collection because the colors go with so many things you don't have to match them specifically to these it just with the big stitch hand quilting they just go like the stitches just look great on anything I use them on with these colors so we're going to choose some thread colors here I think I'm going to start off with this dark teal okay so that it can pop against the white background and I'm going to show you how I big stitch hand quilt alright so we're going to take our needle and I'm just going to feed thread through and I'm going to cut no more than about 18 inches in length the longer you cut your tail the easier it is for it to get tangled so it just works out better and you end up saving time in the end if you do this several times like you work with just smaller chunks okay so this is what I have on the end we need to make a teensy little knot now typically I will do just like this but by the time I do that I end up with a massive massive knot that's not going to work to start off the big stitch hand quilting so let me cut that off and show you a proper quilters knot in my right hand I'm holding the needle by the eye okay in my left hand I'm coming with the tail end of my thread and I'm going to bring that tail end right above the needle I sew with this same hand that I was holding the needle eye with initially I'm now going to grab both the tail end of the thread and the needle eye again now you see that the thread is coming out from here from under my fingers look where the tail was right so with this tail now you're going to wrap it around the needle twice so one two those two little twists that you can barely see okay on the needle shaft right here I'm going to push it so that they go right underneath my fingertips so right now under my fingertips I have the tail end of the thread I have the needle eye and I have those two little twists right well with this head I'm going to pull the needle and you notice what I'm doing I'm pinching those two little twists that I had up there and as you continue to pull the thread while holding on to that you end up with a little baby knot which is perfect for hiding under the top layer of your quilt sandwich here for big stitch hand quilting if you want you can draw lines and actually let me grab my fabric marking pencil so I can show you if you want to use that technique to get some really straight lines for marking out your stitching lines if you want them to kind of follow a specific shape or an outline of something and you like for them to not look as freeform as just winging it by hand you can always do some lines so I have an air and water soluble marker here with a ruler and all you're going to do is take a line that's on a quarter of an inch line on your ruler and line it up with the patchwork so with the seam right here you see how I'm doing that the seam line is going to be on this first dashed line which is my quarter of an inch like that and now from there to here is going to be a quarter of an inch and that's going to give me a pretty good buffer okay of where I can come in to stitch to outline this red piece so I'll turn it this way do the same thing okay you can see so now I know I can stitch here pivot here and come down go off into the binding or whatever does it matter repeat it on the other side and this is a really quick way to just quickly do an outline for yourself all right so it's kind of light because I live in Florida and it's really humid here so all the moisture in the air is like making it disappear but I can still see it hopefully you all can see it and you get the idea so you can do it at home with whatever your preferred fabric marker is all right so now we have quilting lines and we have our thread on the needle with a little knot we made on the end we are absolutely ready to start hand quilting so here's what I do you see spot kind of where on the line you want to begin you're not going to start on the line you want to start at least about and you can eyeball it just a quarter of an inch or half an inch away from the line and I'm only going through the top layer so do you see how you don't see my needle on the back you don't want to see it okay you want to just come away from the line that you want to start on just through the top layer of fabric okay and I'm going to come out on the line when you pull you'll see that you'll get some resistance towards the end because that is where our knot is so what I do is I just put my finger on top of the knot to kind of brace it since I tend to be super rough and yank on this thing but you do want to kind of give it a pull on the thread part and you see what happened the little knot disappeared so now I'm not going to pull too hard because I'll pull it out of this hole too but this is now secured there's a knot underneath with a little extended tail but now I'm ready to start stitching right on my guidelines and if you notice there's no knot on the back either so that's how you want to do it so you can start off with a nice clean beginning and we'll do that at the end as well to finish off our stitching so now for the big stitches and big stitches it's really dependent on what you want to do you can do huge stitches like that from here to here you can do really teensy little baby stitches okay like these I tend to just like start stitching and whatever comes out comes out so to stitch I'm going in the fabric through like right on the line my guide line that I drew and you can see I'm going through all three layers there's my little needle okay and then you want to come back up so if you notice I have a finger underneath here and I'm using that finger to push this back up and guide it through the three layers again to come out on the top so again the needle is in on the line I feel it in the back with my middle finger and then with this finger I tend to like push this down like the quilt top quilt sandwich itself so that I can make way to come up with the needle and this is going to take some practice and kind of what works for you and just feeling out how what is comfortable for you to hold your things if you notice I'm not using a hoop a lot of quilters will hand quilt their quilts using hoops I feel like I have more control when I'm quilting it loose like this especially for a small project so again we're going in on the guideline that we drew poke through all three layers and when you come back up so let's talk about the distances where you go in with the needle and come back out that right here this little hump that you see in the quilt sandwich that's not going to be a stitch that's the spacing in between your stitches okay so you'll see when I pull my needle out that was this chunk of fabric here in the middle so that finished off a stitch and began my next one but there's no stitch in there so when you go in that is going to determine your stitch length where the thread is coming out from to where you go in so from here to here that will be my stitch but on the way up when you bring that tip of the needle back out that's the spacing so the idea for more and in traditional hand quilting is that you try to keep it consistent but really I just do whatever I feel like doing and you'll see we have one two three four five stitches already done there and you can see mine are pretty big that one actually came out a little crooked no big deal just gives it a more organic feel now when I get to the corners this is something a lot of my students often ask is how do they come in an opposite direction like how do you pivot so I like to set it up so that I come out of the sandwich on a point like that so that now you can see when I go back in this is going to start another stitch from here - here I'm coming back up through my three layers and then I have this comes up to the point and it stops there and then a new stitch begins this way and I find that's just like a quick and easy way to take those corners now I'm not using a thimble yet but I'll show you how I do use it because you can end up with a dent in your finger if you do a lot of hand quilting the cool thing about this too is if you get a little distracted and you're not really paying attention if you get off the line all you need to do is pull the thread out and go back to where you were doing it correctly and then continue stitching again okay so I go in where I come back up is the spacing between my stitches if you struggle pulling the needle out with your bare fingers and it's chilly here today so my hands are kind of numb a little bit it's cold but if you can't grab the needle to pull it up once you make a stitch you can also use a cell like a little product that's like a little needle grabber thing that kind of helps you grip it better so you can pull the needle up and out to complete those stitches so if you notice I'm already working my way half way this way okay so you see all the stitches that we've done obviously the bigger the stitches the quicker you'll be done so I'm going to continue ahead with this and when I get to the end I'll meet you back here so I can show you how I tie it off and finish it so we can bury the knots and you don't see a knot again on either the top or the back of our quilt sandwich all right so you can see when I come off into the seam allowance it doesn't really matter how you get across this way because remember this is going to be taken up by the quilt binding so I just kind of like walk my way with the stitches until I get to the the next guideline that I can follow but I've gotten to the end here where you can see I don't have much thread left so I need to tie a knot and then start off with a fresh chunk of thread okay so to bury this and finish off here so that I can pick up with the stitching again here's what you do with my left hand I'm holding on to the thread that's coming up out of the fabric and this is in the position that you want to be you want to have the thread coming up and out of the fabric with my left hand I'm grabbing there with my right hand because I'm right-handed I have the tip of the needle and I'm going to bring it under okay do you see how I looped it through now I have a loop created here well with these two fingers I'm going to open that up and maneuver back and forth with this one until I can get that little twist what's going to turn into a knot okay that we have there down right on top of the quilt top where that hole was where the thread was coming out of you want to maneuver it so it's all the way there so you see you don't want it up here you see how that's not on the bed of or like on the top of the quilt top here you can even use your needle to help you but it's movable so just kind of glide it down open this loop and get it to write words on top of the quilt top and right where it is in position just put your finger right on okay to hold it in place now we're going to pull pull pull with this one and you'll see that we've created a teensy little knot right in the same spot where it needs to be where this thread is coming out of okay so now with my needle I like to pull it aside to see exactly where it's coming out of from the quilt top here and I'm going to put the tip of my needle right in the same spot where it's coming out of I'm traveling only in the quilt top so the needle is not going through to the back just underneath the top layer of fabric and I'm going to go walk with it about a half of an inch away from here when we pull this needle you're going to see what happens we're pulling pulling pulling and because I went in the same hole I took the knot with me so now just kind of scratch it like that to close up the weave of the fabric and you'll see that the last stitch you have is this one and you no longer see the knot but there is enough the knot was right there and from there to here is the thread tail so that's why I like to walk about a half of an inch with it under so that I don't trim it with the not directly under there because it's easier for it to come apart if you leave an extra little tail it's a little more secured now I'll come in and really close to the quilt top just trim it away and that's it your knot is and we'll look under here buried under there with an additional thread tail okay which is never going to be seen either on top or on the bottom and that is how you finish off either when you run out of thread or when you finish quilting the whole project now I'm going to thread up another needle so I can continue my way here and I'll meet you back here once I'm done quilting this block now let me jump in here with another tip you can see I changed my needle from that 22 chenille now I'm using one of the Sascha go needles and that's because I'm almost done I want to get it done faster so I put in a thicker stronger needle so that I can do what is called load up the needle with my stitches if you're working with a really thin or flimsy needle this is not going to work because you'll bend the needle and that's happened to be multiple times on different sized needles until I found the ones that worked for me so you can see this is what loading up the needle is instead of taking one individual stitch and coming up and then stopping to pull the needle instead you go up down up down a few times until you have about three or four different stitches on the needle shaft so I'm going down coming back up going back in coming back up going back in this is probably a little too much but especially when you have batting in there but you can see that now when I pull I went all the way from here to here and I completed three stitches at a time so that once you get a little more comfortable is something that you can do because it really helps you finish your projects a lot faster so we're coming back to where we had started with our first stitches and you can see I don't have too much thread to work with because I ran it kind of close but let's end it off so we can tie it off so to end especially if you're coming back on a line that you already have some previous stitching you need to complete your last stitch so mine I would want it somewhere here and then be coming up out of the fabric it may look like you're taking an extra stitch but it's not so I'll show you I'm coming in up I'm going to take that last stitch and then I need to be coming back up out the fabric I mean that first one we did was a little crooked to begin with but you can see how I've completed from here to here so pretend that my thread isn't there and that's what you're going to end up with so the gap between that first and the last stitch I don't want it to be too big okay so this is I finished that last one and then come back out even if you're close to another stitch just come back out so now we hold the thread here my left hand come in and make a loop and you can do two if you want to one I think is fine for me and now I'm going to maneuver that little knot so it's right on top of the fabric put my finger there so it doesn't move and then pull pull pull pull pull with my right and my little knot is there pick it up and look to see where it's coming out of going in just under the top layer of fabric and then I'm going to come out just a little ways over pull it so that I pull that not under the fabric you can see it's gone I just have my little crooked first stitch there and then again trim close to the fabric and you're done now you can go back if that's all the quilting that you wanted to do of course if you want to do more feel free to do more so now you see my basting stitches I just pull on them and because we don't have any nuts anywhere it's not going to get caught up and I can pull it all out as one solid strand of thread and now you can stand back and look at your little mini quilt block and decide whether or not you want to continue adding more maybe echoing lines a more quilting into the background maybe you'd like to come in here in the Patrick pieces and do some quilting as well I really like doing this echo around because the red is already popping what happens when we stitch a quarter of an inch away is that it's kind of compressing the batting down in those areas and what that allows the red part of the Patrick to do is to really puff up and pop out because the batting in there is nice and fluffed and it's not being compressed by these quilting stitches so that's another way for you to add a pop of color and some fun texture to your cool projects all right and now that our turn style quilt block has been quilted all the layers are put together I definitely want you to click that subscribe button so you don't miss out on the next video because in the next one I'm going to show you how to square up this mini quilt we're going to talk about making and attaching our quilt binding and then I'll also share with you my foolproof way to hang mini quilts on the walls I hope you enjoyed this video tutorial and if you did make sure to hit it with that thumbs up below share it with your crafty friends across the different social media sites and remember if you ever need to get your hands on any of the supplies or materials featured in this video I always include links for you right below in the description box you can click that open and everything you'll need to know is right there for you thanks again for watching this video and I will see you in the next one [Music] make sure to hit it with the thumbs up below share it with your crafty friends along the soul along them here you can see that I have no did that only ok so we are done go ahead hand quilt has been hand quilted we are ready go you won't miss out on the notifications every time I upload a new video to here to my youth to here to here to my youtube channel

Channel: TheCraftyGemini

Views: 101,979

Keywords: crafty gemini, quilting, mini quilt, wallhangig, quilt, hand quilting, big stitch, sewing, quilt block, free, howto, FIY, craftygemini, tutorials, tutorial, 12 wt cotton, thread, fabric, dominicana, timeless treasures, sulky of america, sulky threads, sulky, cotton petites, embroidery

Id: ZWaFwxAWjM8

Length: 28min 28sec (1708 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 11 2016