Secrets to successful quilting stencils - Watch & Learn Quilting Show Episode 9

welcome to handy quilters watch and learn i'm kim sandberg and with me is kelly ashton we're both educators here in the education students right and today we're going to choose show you how to choose a stencil design how to resize it so that it fits exactly on your quilt and then some more great tips just on using stencils to get designs onto your quilt so let's get started so why do we use stencils well when i first started quilting it was a really one of the biggest challenges was how to get a design to my quilt fabric so i might find a design that i liked but now what do i do am i supposed to just freehand it or how do i get it to that to the fabric so when i learned how to make stencils it kind of just opened up a lot of opportunities of things we could do so i'm going to show you some examples of quilts i made long time ago with stencils with stencils okay i love it and so let's start with this one bear with me a little bit so this was a quilt made for my son when he was seven he's such a cute quote he loved bugs and he he grew up in a quilt shop so he knew a lot about fabrics and stuff and just a funny story you know how you randomly try to place your blocks but not really randomly because you don't want two greens together two glues together so i got this all laid out sewn together and i went oh there's two blue ones together and there's three brown ones together so i fixed the blue ones and i went and brown ones are stained i'm not fixing them yeah so i put them on my seven-year-old's bed this quilt on his bed who loves bugs i thought he would just see the bugs and be so excited and he's like mom why are there three brown blocks together they're supposed to be right exactly anyway he loved bugs and this was just really cute fabric and and i had really big borders yeah and i wanted to put some bugs in the borders for the borders yeah okay this one maybe not so i i took the fabric because you can see the turtles right there maybe and i put yeah i just put a turtle in the corner a dragonfly a frog i just put different things in the corners and and you can't see them very well but for a seven-year-old he was like super excited that he had these extra things quilted into his quilt i love it it was like a secret code from his mom right yeah so like their name being quilted in or whatever it was just like he liked the bug so that was so what i did was just looked at the fabric right and wanted to get those designs onto my quilt how do i get them onto my quilt i'm going to show you a couple more examples before i tell you the answer okay all right let's take a look at this one now to my grandkids yes grandkids so which have such cute these are well used so we're just gonna hold those there for now yeah so i chose minky that kind of was something that the kiddos would like so that lincoln got pirates adorable i love it and he wanted a pirate birthday he just really liked pirates yeah so i wanted to take a pirate and put it on the front of the quilt with his name oh so making a pirate was not something that i could just come up with so i just had to take the pirate to the copy machine yeah and blow it up and then be able to applique it and quilt it on the front of the quilt and use that as an inspiration to kind of create yeah so i use the fabric as inspiration so we'll show these too a little bit this one was just an owl and it had the owl well and i noticed yeah the owl and the minky and you did some couching on this one how fun is that to add a little bit of extra this guy was he's this little guy was really tactile when he was small so i even put strips of the couching on it because he just loved to rub things so that is so great and then this one this one's got multiples yeah this one was birds so cute so i just took some of the birds and this isn't this isn't really my quilting this was kind of applicable but it's the same theory right so i just took and same with their names i just had to blow up their names yeah okay so so learning how to make a stencil kind of opened up all these different ideas and opportunities for for my quilts absolutely so let's show you yeah what kind of tools you need how do we create a stencil to be able to take images or designs and to make them the size that you want to be able to put them on a quilt exactly to quilt them and i'm kind of going with characters today you can do feathers you can do all kinds of things like the designs or opportunities are limitless but so i took oh i didn't bring the fabric in but i took the same kind of thing i took this fabric and i just photocopied the fabric uh-huh but i needed it bigger this oh yeah this is like three inches and i needed it like 10 inches yeah so i want to show you yeah too small that's too small you never see what it is so this is called the quilter's assistant proportional scale i love this tool yeah it's one of my favorites i think i had it in my studio for a few years before i understood how to use it so i want to make sure you know how to use it the inside circle is the original size so i'm going to say that this this little photocopy is three inches okay and then i want it to be ten inches okay so i make the outside ring ten inches and i line up the three inches on the inside and the ten inches on the outside okay and then it tells me how much i need to blow it up in the window so i just take it to the copy machine now and because what i did before was i took it at the copy machine and blew it up um and you had to guess right yeah and 150 oh too small yeah and like 17 copies later you still haven't gotten the right size right right right so this told me to go from a three inch block to a ten inch block i actually had to blow it up three hundred and fifty percent did i line that up i think it's just a hair over three hundred and fifty yeah i might have shifted it just a little bit well and you know one of the things i love about this i remember somebody explained to me how to use it and i was like i am never going to remember that luckily the instructions are written right on it they're right on it so and you can do it in reverse if i had a 10 inch block and i wanted to make it say 8 inches i lined those up and it tells me that i need to reduce it by about 80 very cool so this little tool comes in really handy in my studio yours as well absolutely okay so once i get the copy or the picture the size i want it here's my 10 inch porpoise and my 10 inch frog now what kim do i just lay it on the quilts no because you want to simplify that to be able to stitch it out because we just want to stitch out the outline you're not going to go in and stitch out all that extra detail right nope and well i might stitch out his eyes yeah that's it that's true but i don't need to stitch out the rest of it you're not necessarily going to stitch out everything um well i know that marking stuff is always hard for me so i know we you have a really great method we have a really great method of creating a stencil using the good old golden threads paper this stuff is awesome because it is thin so it's easy to see through you can trace you don't even have to put it on like a light box or up to a window no you can see right maybe this one i didn't draw and you can see right through it yeah i have a leaf on there but it's easy i just traced this purpose right onto this plate right perfect i love it okay but then still how do we get it onto the fabric so you have a couple of options yeah okay so i could put this right on the fabric and i could stitch right through it right because this stuff this paper like tears really usually i've done that for really intricate things yeah trick if you're going to tear it off don't just start tearing it off take wait till your quilt comes off and then pull your your fabric on the bias a little bit and then you can just take um the sticky oh like the little rollers yeah and then you can just pick up all the little extra pieces of paper like that if you choose to stick stitch through it but if you choose to stitch through it then i have to make one for every square i want to quilt it in yeah so instead i'm just going to turn this into a stencil that we can use over and over and over again awesome yes awesome okay like even more than on this quilt yes i've packed around stencils in my suitcase for sure years and they still work really well yup so how do we get holes in the yeah i already made them in this so let's let's talk about this frog how are we going to make holes in this so there's a couple of different ways you can do it one you can take it to a sewing machine and take the thread out and then you can just stitch around it like drop your feed dogs just a domestic sewing machine and do that you can do it on your long arm too just make sure your alarms are turned off so it's not telling you hey there's no threshold thread you can do that or this is this is one and i had fun showing this to kelly because she had never seen before so this is a taylor's will but it's actually one that has larger spikes on it yeah it's a lot pokier than the old ones i used to use yes there's there's there's ones that just have kind of like a series i almost want to say like a serrated edge on it but it's not sharp and those are for like the carbon yeah these ones actually poke holes so you can just use that and make sure you put a cutting mat or something underneath it when you're doing it could i do it right on my fabric you could you could do it right on your fabric but you can just take and just with a little bit of pressure you can just roll that right along your line there and you'll end up with those little holes perfect that you can put the pounce pad through before i knew how to do that i'll show you how i did it how would you do it so we have this glued tape dispenser all it is is double sided sticky tape and i'm going to put it on the back of this the stencil not not where i'm going to stitch that right right i'm just going to put it on like that okay okay and then i can just put this on my fabric and i'm going to actually unthread the machine okay there we go i'll have to thread it again in a second it's okay and then and then i like big stitches i don't like i'm going to put it for five stitches per inch i'm not going to make 10 stitches per inch i just want and i'm just going to hold this in place that little sticky kind of holds it and then i like to set my hand on the ruler base and kind of help me slow down okay so you have the ruler basically i have the right now i'm using that as a table and then i just stitch around yeah frog like this and you know what it's okay if i don't follow the lines exactly nobody's gonna know because and i would leave that needle up but i'm just gonna make holes all the way around okay yeah that's perfect and i i did it already on the porpoise nice the dolphin i actually helped a friend uh just a couple weeks ago she was working on a vintage quilt for somebody and it had a whole bunch of open negative space and then it had kind of maple leafs in a lot of the blocks and the maple leaf blocks were what was vintage and what they were really wanting to share with this family member meant a lot to them and so we we just copied the maple leaf i love it and we just quilted faux maple leaves in all of those open blocks with a negative space so it worked out really well that's great okay now i poked holes through this porpoise yeah so on this way so on this side it's really rough because that's where the paper went through this side is smooth and this side is rough so which side do i want up when i'm pouncing it we want the rough side out we do want the rough side it's a good question it pulls that pattern pulls the fabric or the powder down into those holes exactly so i'm going to stencil this on here okay i like to ask when i'm teaching how many of you have successfully used a pounce pad before and the keyboard successfully successfully so um let's talk about pounds yeah that's really cool it's awesome yeah when you get a pounce pad it has a seal on it and and you have to break the seal and that's why it's called a pounce pad you have to sit and pounce it until you get an even distribution of chalk and we chose the blue one so that you could see it yeah okay so i do have to i do have to give you just a caution with blue chalk if you're going to use it on your fabric you need to test it and make sure that it it will come out always just like any other marking tool right it's really hard to get out of white um yeah i've been going to do some more research on it because i found out the colored chalk kind of reacts with the sizing that's in our fabrics and so it was designed before we put the sizing in so if you're pre-washing which i don't like to pre-wash i like my nice firm fabric so well and i want to just get to cutting and sewing right yeah not spend time pre-washing pressing i know i'm pressing again who wants to do that i know i know a lot of you like to pre-wash it's good it's fine but we all get to do our own thing yeah okay so i have the rough side up but i have the ruler base on the machine and i really like to use this to my advantage because when i'm pouncing oh yeah if i have that ruler base underneath me it gives me a nice flat surface to pound to stencil again right so once i've initially got an even flow of chalk through my pounce pad okay now i'm ready to use it okay i do not pounce it at my quilts right so i pounce it before and then i bring it to my quilt top and i swipe swipe i'm just gonna brush it across there yep and that's where those little holes that have been poked through they just grab that chalk and they pull it down to the fabric i just move it around a little bit make sure that i got oh look at that that's perfect can you see that cute little purpose totally see it and it is so great because it's right there i'll be able to quilt it and then most of these pounds it's either iron off or a lot of them while you're quilting you'll notice that the chalk will kind of bounce away you so you can kind of wipe off the extra and but another trick is if you if you feel like your chalk is not staying on the fabric you could just spritz your fabric a little bit before you pounced it so spritz your fabric put your stencil down even the paper it's fine and then and then swipe the chalk across and your your chalk will stay there with the water exactly but like kim said there are two different types of chalk on the market that i know about right and one of them is is um water soluble and one of them is the iron iron off yeah the iron off so just make sure you know which one you have so that um with white chalk generally all it takes for me to remove it is just to take my lint yeah the velvety lint brush yep and just and i just rub it and it'll come off yep so totally so now stencils so we talked about how to get the design there one thing that's is a little tricky is just learning how to to quilt a stencil do you want to talk about tips to quilting with stencils yeah yeah let's talk about this so one of the important things is you look at the stencil and first you need to choose like kind of your stitch path right so it's always smart to take a minute but you know while you're making the stencil especially the way that kelly did it here in the frame that's kind of a chance to practice stitching it out ahead of time even taking your finger and running it along letting you stitch the holes in it yeah when you stitch the holes in it that's like a good practice run but figure out what your stitch path is going to be and don't forget if you're starting to stitch it and you get stuck somewhere stop put your needle down step back and take a look at it and figure out where you need to go you mean the machine stops it does it does sometimes i forget that i get so excited okay we all do yeah so and and don't be afraid sometimes especially when you're creating a custom stencil design you may need to stitch back over some of your stitch paper which is fine yeah it's okay to do that once again you have rules but the most important thing when you start stitching is to always be looking ahead and not looking exactly where the needle is if you are looking where the needle is you're already too late to make any adjustments it would be like driving down the road and looking at the hood of your car you can't react to something that's down the road so you always want to be looking a little bit ahead a few inches ahead so that you know where you're headed and where it's going to go but i think the most important thing is to remember when you're done is anybody going to know exactly what that stencil looks like what's supposed to happen to the chalk when you're done yeah it goes away it's gone exactly so it doesn't matter if you followed that line exactly but it does matter if you made a nice smooth line exactly if you think of like the old uh dotted dots that we used to do yes one to two to three to four we got lots of like square cats because we didn't really know what shape we were putting between one and two so if you just think of like the dot to dot and you make your dots but think about the shape the arc between the loop just think about the shape you're doing and look at your point you're headed to you're going to have a much nicer smooth line absolutely that's a great tip it's just so we do it so naturally when we drive a car yes you really have to train your eye to do it at this machine because we all want to watch the needle that's yeah we want to watch our stitches so don't watch your stitch no look ahead look ahead always be looking ahead like you're driving a car so that's important and i think the other thing is is to be creative with these have fun with it you know we showed you how to pull a design from the fabric there's lots of different ways that you can get inspiration that you can find to create your own stencils and make them fit perfectly on your next project right right and you have all the tools now yes to make it the right size and to get that design right to your fabric exactly so no excuses if you want to put cats on your next your next quilt you can do it or if you want to do fancy feathers and you haven't ever been brave enough to try this is a perfect way to get the feathers on there and just be able to follow that path so follow that line try something new this week yes yes i think that sounds great kim let's take just a moment and talk about this quilt on the wall yeah let's do isn't this an amazing quilt this is another vintage quilt from our awesome challenge that went out to the national educators this was quilted by martha higdon who lives in indiana and this is all free motion quilting and one of the things we loved about this was we sent her an email and said hey martha tell us a little bit more about how you quilted this quilt and she actually used the golden threads paper to create the arch and to mark it evenly so that she would be able to get these pieces all her quilting would be yeah even precise and even exactly and the best part because she created the stencil she didn't she could just very quickly mark it and then move on to the next thing but that is it is it is an amazing quilt and she spent some serious time quilting this she said she spent over 35 hours i thought 37 and a half you did a fantastic job martha we love it it's amazing i love all things orange so this quilt really spoke to me it's beautiful yeah well thanks for watching today be sure to watch next week and we'll share more tips and tools that help us in our quilting journey and hopefully inspire you too be sure to subscribe to our channel like this video and share it with all of your quilting friends but most of all have fun quilting this week

Channel: Handi Quilter

Views: 9,748

Rating: 4.9361024 out of 5

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

Id: RkfDuCjn1eY

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020