Prepping your quilt for longarm quilting - Watch & Learn Quilting Show Episode 20

welcome to watch and learn i'm christina whitney and with me i have kelly ashton we're studio educators here at handy quilter today we're going to talk to you about prepping your quilt for long army so kelly do you do a lot of quilting for other people i have for years so right now i'm not but yes i have done a lot of quilting for other people so you've seen a lot of quilts come in in lots of different conditions so i have as well and so we're here today to kind of give you some tips on getting those quilt tops prepared whether or not you're going to be the one long-arming it or if you're going to be taking it to somebody else to longer that's right so let's start at the beginning we're going to talk about piecing and making sure that our seams are the right size and which way to press that's always a question so first of all we want to make sure we have a quarter inch seam and the reason for that you can kind of see in this example here i put a pin here to mark it i don't want to stab myself but if you look closely this quilt the seam wasn't a full quarter inch on both sides and you can tell it's going to start popping open so when it was first pieced together you might not notice that but when you load it on the quilt and you have that little or on the long arm and you get that tension it's going to pop that seam open and possibly the foot would catch in that open seam so it's really important to check and make sure that you don't have any open seams correct and what could happen if that foot got caught in there we pretty disaster yeah we hate to talk about that yes especially if it's a customer quilt and then having to call somebody and say hey your seams were open and we're going to have to do a patch right here or something yeah so really check and make sure that all of the seams are really secure so that's why we like that quarter inch seam pressing the seam there's the whole controversy of open or closed which do you do kelly so i i don't have a preference as a piecer like there are some patterns i just press open but as a long arm quilter if if someone asked me to stitch in the ditch i would only stitch in a ditch on a seam that's pressed to one side i don't have a ditch really if if the seams have been pressed open so so when i'm piecing my own quilts i think about how i'm going to want to quilt it and if i want to stitch in the ditch to make this star pop out then i'm definitely going to press to the side so that's my choice yeah so that's something to consider when you are doing your piecing do you want to be able to stitch in the ditch if you do want to be able to stitch in the ditch then you need to press your seams to the side i like to think of it as you can maybe see on this this has been pressed open yeah and if the longer comes and stitches on that and it hits those threads from the pc it's going to break those threads open and there's not going to be anything holding that whereas if it was pressed to the side it's going to stitch right over the top i'm with you christina i i won't stitch down the middle of a seam because there's a chance of shredding the thread that's holding that seam together so i i won't stitch down the middle but i would do a top stitch which means it would be off to the side just a little bit so yeah and again that's probably personal preference if people want to have the top stitch or if they want it right in the ditch so things to think about as we're doing the piecing another thing that your long armor will really appreciate is if you're consistent with your seam pressing so this seam right here part of it is pushed to the side part of it's open and part of it is over on this other side now i know sometimes that has to happen but especially with borders if you can make sure that you're pressing the seams one direction then if you are doing stitch in the ditch it's not going back and forth over that seam so that makes it a lot nicer and it lays smoother so right any other comments on those seams and pressing them it's just hugely impactful on in the quilting process if your seams are pressed well so yes um there's also the whole controversy of steam versus starch versus ironing you know i don't have a personal preference on that one i usually just iron mine but do you do anything special with yours kelly i use starch on some and i use lots of steam on everything i just i like i like that hot iron so yeah i like using just a misting spray sometimes i'll use best press if i really need it to stay where i want it we're giving you our opinions of what works well for us so there is always more than one right answer so correct you know but find out what works best for you and for you as a long armor or for who you're taking it to to be long armed so yeah and there's always exceptions to the rule so that's right okay another thing with pressing is do you press to the dark or to the light so on this block i'm gonna have you see the wrong side of the fabric so all the the back of it you can see that some of these are pressed to the white side and some of them are pressed to the red side but if you look on this one where it's pressed to the light side on that white see how this red fabric kind of frays a little bit if we were to turn it over and stitch it out you would see those threads through that white fabric so it's really important that if you do have to press it that direction that you go back and you snip all of those little threads and make sure that that red is not showing through onto the white fabric i noticed christina that they even use a pinking shear on that which generally helps to not have as much fray on the edge but even with that you you still have to check and make sure that you don't have those dark threads that will be showing through on the other side with your white fabrics yeah and it's not always just the threads sometimes if your seam isn't exactly even if the red side is a little bit higher and you fold it over it yeah a tip of that red fabric will actually shift it can show yes so sometimes you'll even have to go back and trim that if you don't want it to show through on the white right so so more things to think about as you're preparing your quilt okay let's pretend like we have finished our quilt top and it is ready to go this quilt has a stay stitch on it so it was just stitched all the way around the edge and some people say well i already stitched my quilt why would i do something like that so let me show you that real quick hold on show us how close to the edge that stay stitch is where where do you want that stay stitch to lie so within like less than a quarter of an inch from the edge right you want that stay stitch to end up in your binding so you don't want that stay stitch to be you know like a half an inch then that's something you would have to pick out so make that stay stitch within that fourth of an inch so an eighth of an inch is a good number to go with so if we look at this quilt here this is the edge of the quilt and it has not been stay stitched and watch what happens can you see that stretch if i pulled really hard if i had lots of tension when i was on the long arm i could even be popping those seams open and we don't want that to happen i've noticed if i use a really small stitch when i'm stitching it it doesn't as easily come apart but if i use a little longer stitch in my piecing which sometimes it's not a long one but but it'll just those ends will just pop right open as i'm putting it on the long arm so really a good idea to add that stay stitch and some people will say well i backstitched when i was piecing well a lot of times if you trim those blocks after you've done the back stitching you actually cut off the back stitching so that's not going to hold it in place so stay stitching is a great idea i've had lots of customers that bring their edges surged to me search works fine for me too yeah and it makes it so much easier to load and to keep the quilt straight and not to pop any of those seams so that will actually save your quilter or yourself time in the long run which you know time is money so yeah who doesn't want to save some of that okay one other thing that i want to mention about your quilt top is that sometimes they might get a little bit dirty or you might inherit a quilt top from somebody that has stains on it or vintage quilts make sure that you don't wash that quilt top until after it's been quilted it can just make a big huge mess with all the fraying on those seams that are exposed and then you have to do lots of clipping lots of pressing so usually we recommend that you go ahead and quilt it and then wash it after it's been quilted yes and and some people will put their quilts in the washer and dryer they like the look of of that other people don't like that so if i'm washing one like that i might just lay it in the tub and soak it really good and then i fold it up carefully and press the water out and lay it out carefully on something that i don't want to appear to have that washed look so and that's after you've quilted it after i quilted it yes i won't i won't wash a quilt top before not only will you like stitch or clip lots of threads you may have open seams after that too so yep yeah okay so kelly you've got a quilt top over there that's ready to be taken to the quilter okay so i hate to get into anything that's controversial but how should you fold it up to take it to the quilter so for me personally you can find any kind of answer you want but i like my seams to be folded to the inside so those seams are protected and if i've gone to all the work of clipping all those threads and and trying to protect the seams that i created then i want to fold it so that those seams are to the inside and and i'm going to fold it after i've gone to the work of preparing all that top pressing it having it all ready i'm going to fold it carefully and sometimes i fold it i like to put it on a hanger so i fold it the width of the hanger and then i can just fold it over a hanger like that and take it ready to be to the long arm also long armors don't like the top and the back folded together so so separate those fold them up separately when you take them to the long arm quilter so i've actually had a customer bring me a quilt top that was rolled up on a swim noodle because she didn't want any creases in it i like that so that's another idea if you've done a lot of pressing before you take it to your if it gets a couple of creases in it i can miss those on the long arm and get all those little creases out so as long as it's had a good pressing job before it comes to me i can get any of the little wrinkles out so without a lot of extra effort so okay so let's talk about the quilt back so how do you prepare your quilt back your quilt back has got to be at least four inches bigger all the way around so that means if my quilt is 60 inches wide and 70 inches long i want to have it at least 68 by 78 and a lot of people don't understand why we need that extra fabric for one i'll give you a couple of reasons if i have a solid piece of fabric for my back and i have it a piece top that i'm using on the top it'll often those seams will kind of actually stretch a little bit as i'm loading it on the frame so it's always just a little bit different because of that and then also just as you roll it up on those bars it's interesting how it comes off and and you lose a little bit of your backing that way but we also most importantly we need that extra fabric to be able to pin to our leaders and to stretch it out on the sides so make sure that your quilt back is large enough for years i took quilts that were maybe again inch bigger or something and and tried to make it work and it's so frustrating for both of us in the end so just do yourself a favor and make sure you have plenty of backing fabric so this is a big wide piece of fabric okay so before you take this to your long arm i'm going to stretch it out you want to make sure that it's it's square and it's on green and i get a lot of questions about what is it how do you know if it's on grain this is a 108 fabric and so it was actually torn also a debatable subject whether you should tear it or not i don't love the leafy lettucey edge after it's torn but i do know that tearing it can also make it really square so make sure that if you're buying a wide back like this that you buy it even probably a little bigger than your eight inches so that you've got room to square it up so so here's my quilt back and i have it laid across my bars and it's a little confusing but the ends right here and right over here these are the parts that i'm going to load onto the frame but for right now i want to see if it's on grain and if it's square so i'm going to lay it across and and i've got the fold down at the bottom and i'm going to put my sides together and i'm going to lay it across the bar like this and i hopefully you can see on the on the camera that it's not on green that grain is twisted the fabric is twisted just a little bit so i need to adjust my backing so that i it's on grain so i'm going to just come and straighten it out so kelly while you're straightening it out i just want to clarify so the part that is horizontal to your pole is what will be on these will be on the sides okay so the parts i'm pinning are the ones on the sides right now okay okay so i had to straighten this out a little bit so right now my sides are not even so can you see that that's like almost three inches that it's off so i've got to cut those sides so that when i load it it loads square so i'll just take the bottom where i have the fold and i'll fold it up onto the frame and make sure that it's still on grain and square and then i can take these two ends i'm not doing it very carefully right but i can take these two ends right to my cutting table and and straighten this cut and i'll straighten the other side this one and then when i load it like this then i know that the the load the top that i'm loading on my leader and the bottom that i'm loading on my leader are square so why is it important to have a square back well you kind of want to have your top to look square when it's done and if your backing is all scrumpus then when you get done quilting it's going to be kind of crazy yeah so if you care about having a square quilt when you take it off of the frame a couple of simple steps like just checking to make sure that it's square and on grain with your back will help you to take a square quilt off of your long arm so can i interject something there please yeah um so sometimes we go through all this effort of making a square backing but we don't check to make sure that our leaders are square over time sometimes your leaders will get stretched and they'll no longer be square so so this is for you as a long armor so if that's the case you can always get new leaders and they just velcro on and off you can get multiple sets so that you can have one quilt being pinned on or basted on while you've got another one going and i'm just going to say really quick that for those of you who own a long arm that if you have a super leader on this back take-up pole it makes it such an easier process in loading these backings because you're not having to bend over the frame to kind of load so a super leader is a fantastic for those of you who have the long arm so okay and those that don't have a long arm you want one okay changing let's talk about backings just a little bit more okay all right so most of the backings that i run into have just one main seam it's two it's a 45 or 40 42 44 wide backing okay and you say you need 80 90 inches so you're just gonna take two widths of fabric and take the length and sew those so you have one long seam in your backing right so it's really important if you want that backing to lay nice and flat and square first off that you cut off the sail bridges now once again this is kelly's opinion you can do whatever you like but your selvage doesn't have the same stretch to your fabric that the rest of your fabric has so my recommendation if you were bringing to me is make sure that you cut off that selvage it makes a nice straight line to sew again so if you choose to use it to help you sew then make sure it's a really wide seam but in my backings i like to have like a wider seam a half to 5h inch seam and then i like it pressed open i know we were just talking about pressing the quilt top but this is your backing if you'll press open that seam at the back you don't even feel you don't even know that you're going over a seam back there it just lays really nice in your quilt so um that's that's my recommendation is just to make sure that you're pressing that open and cut off your selvage and on that seam i'm not opposed to leaving the salvage on on the side but some people are so you maybe you want to check with your with your long armor do you want to know my lazy version for doing that yeah so i like to have the selvedge because like you mentioned it keeps it nice and straight so i just sew like a one inch seam and then i can go back and cut off the selvage yeah i i do the same thing actually but i i cut it i make an even bigger seam because i like at least a half an inch or more so okay the other thing is is backings when we load it on the frame as a long armor it works a lot better if i can load this one seam horizontally with the frame so if if you're thinking about if your if your quilt top is directional your back is directional or you want a pattern to be if something's directional about it i'm fine tipping the whole thing sideways and you know quilting chicken sideways or whatever but if for some reason it has to be the other direction you may want to think about that when you're when you're piecing your backing but um it's just a good tip for a long armor to be able to to load that seam horizontally with the bars okay you don't want to get that bulk of rolling that seam over and over on top of it itself because that will take it out of square also we should have grabbed that one quilt we have one quilt out there that the backing is just like a whole bunch of fat quarters sewn together it's perfect it's fine it's a great way to use up your extra fabric and if you have a lot of seams in it like that it doesn't really matter but if you just have one one seam it's nice if it can be loaded along with the bar okay then another trick is i i often had people bring me a quilt back and they needed to add just a couple inches around the edges or say eight inches around the edges to make it big enough all the way around which gave you a piece of backing that was like a frame it had a center piece say just a big center piece of fabric and then they put an extra piece all the way around it it's really hard for a long armor to to put your quilt top centered in that so my recommendation is if you have to add extra fabric that shows it's a contrasting fabric make sure you add it like to the center or off center or something but not just a frame around your backing that makes it really tricky for the long armor to try to make it line up so you could even add it just to one side rather than both sides and expect it to be centered yes i i'm okay with that look i'm i'm asymmetrical but some people are very symmetrical so if you need it to be symmetrical then just add it to the center and not around the sides because you're if you're symmetrical you're not going to be happy with how that frame comes out on the back it's really hard to make it perfectly match okay so this was just an example of a backing that has a lot of seams but they all run the same direction so if i were going to load this backing it makes it easy to just load all of those seams going the same way as the bars it would be pretty tricky to load the backing with the seams the other direction so yes okay i think that's all the tips i had on the quilt backs preparing your back so is there anything else that we need to cover on preparing the backing and the top i think a lot of this information is stuff that people know but just understanding why people do things the way that they do and understanding that it's not there's not a law that says you have to do it this way you can pick and choose what works for you and it might be different than what we do it might be different than what your neighbor does but if it works for you then more power okay i wanted to cover just a little bit um when you take a quilt to a long armor often for years and years people would bring me quilts and i'd say how would you like it quilted what thread would you like used and my answer frequently given was whatever you like so we all have kind of a vision a picture in our mind of what we want that quilt to look like when we're finished piecing it it's really helpful if you kind of think about it and have a good conversation with your quilter about what you'd like that to look like i had someone bring me a beautiful redwork quilt top that they wanted quilted and they asked me to quilt it in red thread that wasn't going to work for me red thread is kind of unforgiving and i wanted their red work to be the the focus not my red thread so we had a good conversation about that and and helped her to understand why that probably wasn't the best choice but but if you took this quilt to your long-arm quilter and just said quilted just the same everywhere but you actually had a picture of her quilting the borders differently in the center she would have quilted edge to edge the same design so it's really important that you kind of if you have a picture of what your quilt what you want it to look like when it comes off that frame it's important to have a good conversation with your quilter about what you think what would you like it to look like when you're done so i love it when someone turns it over to me and says do whatever you like but but if i had strong opinions about what i wanted it to look like make sure that you share that with your long-arm quilter so and batting is a really you know we've talked about batting before but batting is a really important factor in the quilting process well as well so make sure you talk to your long-arm quilter about if she has batting she prefers that works well with her machine or if she's open to any kind of batting so that's a good conversation to have as well okay and we love when you guys comment and when you ask questions and we will try to answer those for you so if you have any other questions that we didn't clarify please please please put those in the comments okay um before we leave let's just talk quickly about the quilt on the wall okay so we've showed this one before because it's one of our favorites but this one was pieced by kim sandberg our studio edit one of our studio educators and um we'll have to share the pattern with you in the comments so it was one she found in a magazine and she custom quilted it it looks like it just kind of has an edge to edge design but she actually custom quilted she the piecing in the in the blocks are a little different than they are in the background fabric so it's one of our favorites on my list so thank you for joining us today so um give us a like leave us a comment we'll be happy to love to answer your questions and subscribe to our youtube channel so that you don't miss our our upcoming videos we have a lot of watch and learn videos available for you so have some fun quilting

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 11,519

Rating: 4.9921412 out of 5

Keywords: Handi Quilter, Longarm, Sewing, Quilting, Quilts, Free-motion Quilting, Finishing Quilts, quilter, longarm quilt, quilting tips

Id: byvbME7I_hU

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021