Using Paper Templates for Machine Quilting

okay now we're going to talk about one of my favorite ways to mark and that is the quilting paper and what I have done here is I've already cut out some squares from my roll of quilting paper and I've kind of just a little bit larger than my design that I want to trace on here and I've already started tracing this design and I'm using a permanent marker for a reason you want to use a permanent marker that's going to speak permanent on your paper so that it won't transfer with the thread onto your fabric ink and pencil both will do that they kind of migrate in with the thread so a permanent marker stays with the paper and rips off with the paper so all I do is I just continue tracing this design onto this paper and if you only had wanted to repeat this design once you could go ahead and use this piece of paper just as is and lay it right directly on your fabric and stitch over it so here we are let's finish up this design it's very very simple tracing don't have to have any artistic talent to do this that's for sure okay so now my design is traced now if I just wanted to use this one design and I had one block that I wanted to use this in I could simply just go ahead put this on my fabric and stitch it but I happen to have a little sample quilt here that I want to repeat this design several times actually 16 times and so I have gone ahead and cut out that many of these squares of paper from my paper my roll of paper I used a rotary cutter and a ruler just like you'd cut fabrics so there's not anything new there and I lay the one on top that I have marked and I get these all lined up on here take all of the thread out of my machine and put this in the machine just like you would a quilt and I want to quilt on these designs so all I'm doing is perforating this with no thread so I stitch on this design now you do not want to have more than 15 layers in here I push that a lot if I have a quilt that I need 18 I'll push it but you just need to know that the holes get bigger the further down in the stack that you go and so the more layers that you have the more fragile those bottom layers get so you really have to think about if you have an intricate design having fewer layers is probably better if it's a pretty simple design and it doesn't really matter if the bottom one has their holes and I'm just quilting this like you would if you had it on paper or I'm sorry if you had it on a quilt so if I had thread in my machine I had a quilt in here I'd be doing exactly the same thing I'm doing now I cut the paper a little bit larger than the design just so I have something to hold on to when I'm stitching it and also something to pin onto my fabric when I want to put it on the quilt and I missed this little spot over here let's just go back and make that right and I'll know which line to use when I'm actually stitching so even if you make a little mistake you can fix it it's not a problem so then what I would do is I could just peel these off just like this and lay this on my fabric now when you use the one that does not have the lines drawn on it as you can see it's a little bit harder to see what I have on my work table is I have a light that shines right here and it's just an inexpensive office supply work light and it just gives a little bit more light right on that that perforated paper sometimes it really does help to turn it upside down and the perforations are sticking up and that gives you a little bit more visibility so there's a couple different ways you can deal with that so that is how you would do repeat motifs using the quilting paper okay now to continue with this if you were going to use let's say we were going to use this piece of paper and you wanted to put it in this square right here as with stencils this is a little different with stencils you leave the pins in until you're ready to stitch at this point we are ready to stitch so we need to take the pins out from underneath and lay this in there and I can see my seam lines around the corner of it so I just kind of line it up in that little square where I want it and then I put the pins back in and with something this small I leave the pins open because it gives me just a little bit of a handle to pull those pins out quickly and I can just lay them down flat lay my hands on top of them if it was a bigger area or a border I was going all the way around I might close those pins and take them out as I go but with something this small you can just put the pins in put thread back in your machine stitch right on top of this paper and then I'll show you how to remove it okay now I'm going to teach you how to make a border design fit a border now what I have done here is I have a design on paper and I had to make it a little bit bigger to fit this border so I took it to the copy machine i enlarged it a little bit just to make it fit and that so I have the corner design and I have the straight line design so when you have a corner design you need to keep the corner the way the corner was designed you can't mess with that so that has to come first so normally what I would do is draw the corner design on one piece of paper and then put that in a stack with three more and perforate the four corners but for today's purposes I wanted to draw the model all on here so that you could see what I've drawn and then I did the same thing with the with the lengths of the border I drew I would draw one on top and then lay that with several perforate those so I'd have many different of the same thing I would have copies of the same thing to layout across the border now the first thing you need to do when you're using quilting paper you need to take the pins out from underneath the paper so I laid my quilt out flat so that I know that it's going to stay flat while the pins are out and I just want to remove all of these pins from underneath okay now once you have all of your pins out from underneath where you want to put your border on you take the two corners or two of the corners and lay those on here and line them up how you want them to be and I usually try to be within a quarter inch of the seam line and then you'll want to pin that in place with a few of the safety pins and for right now I just want to pin it so it just kind of stays there okay so I have to make an adjustment put the other side of the border on the other corner opposite that pin that on in just a few places just to make sure it stays there make sure it's flat borders never fit perfectly it just doesn't happen and so what you need to do is line this up this flower this very end of this flower lines up with this flower so I lay that on there and then I lay this on here this Apple lines up with this Apple underneath it and I see here that this flower lines up with this flower way over here so I actually have this much space that I need to adjust my design now to do that if you made it that adjustment all in one spot it would be of course obvious so what you need to do is make small adjustments over the length of that border to lengthen that border without any noticeable adjustments so what I do is I take a pair of scissors and I just start kind of cutting it in places that I know I can add some space so I can cut it here add some space there pin that and then this goes over the top of that so I'm just going to pin that in place and this is not a perfect science you can adjust your stitching as you stitch if things don't line up exactly you can make up for that when you're actually stitching it so you don't need to pin this paper on exactly how you needs to be to stitch so you can kind of so then you would continue on making cuts in this in places that make sense of where you can add space and go do that all the way across and I just keep spacing this out and bringing it over until I see that I have enough added space to make up for what that adjustment needs and I may need to make a cut in between each one of these motifs to make it work and if that's the case that's what I'll do so that comes over there and then I just keep cutting away on this until it works and luckily this is a design that is a little easier to adjust than a lot of the designs that I have used in the past so see these to line up and I could even add an apple in there or I could add a flower in there if it was too much room and I just needed to add something else it wouldn't be noticed it's something that just kind of goes along with it it's really noticeable now because it's in black but so then I could just keep on going that's why I only used a couple of pins here okay keep on going and cut this and make some space here move this over and this is this is the beauty of this paper is you can keep adjusting and changing and moving and you've never made a mark on your fabric so it's not permanent it's not permanent until you get it right where you want it and you're ready to stitch it here's another way that quilting paper truly makes a difference on my quilts a lot of times you'll come across an area in a coil to a block a piece apart that it's kind of an odd shape and there's not a quilting design that fits that shape so here's what I do to solve that little problem you know most the time consistency in quilts just like an artwork and music is really pleasing so you kind of like to use pieces and parts of a quilting design that you're already putting in your quilt and make it fit an odd place and here is a spot this shape right here is kind of a little bit different you're not going to find a commercial stencil that fits that shape or at least not one that's going to go with what you've already quilted so what I did was I made a design to fit in that area and I'm going to show you how I arrived at that I have some quilting paper here that what I did was I drew from this design from this actual quilt I laid this paper on top of here took rulers and drew and I have a dotted line across where my quarter inch seam would be so I know what exact space I need to fill with a design and then I move the quilt out of the way and take different just different sizes of the design that I've already got on my quilt to kind of play with what that what I might be able to use to fill in that area and this nice big flower here seemed very obvious that I could put that in the center well that worked really well on this size but then when I needed to fill in this area this part of it seemed like a really good choice but it was way too big to fit once I had drawn this area in here I had a smaller area so I took a copy of this that was reduced and that side of it fit perfectly let me show you on the one that's already done this one this is traced exactly what this smaller version of the design is so I took the flower from the larger one and the little grassy flower one from the smaller one and it all fit together perfectly and then I took some of the little doodads from here and there and just filled in the extra spaces it's not anything that it's difficult it just takes a little playing around with and it's actually very fun okay now I'm going to teach you how to take the quilting paper off once you've sewn it on here's a little insight to my life I saw the quilting paper on all day and then I rip it off in the evenings when I'm sitting in front of the TV set it's great no mind work and the easy thing to do is to rip off the big pieces and you can just lay your finger underneath and pull just a little bit to pop it away from the scenes and that will just give you a little place to start and I use my fingernails to get up underneath it and pull it off as much as I can and I if I put my hand underneath and kind of push up on it it really pulls off much easier now when you're doing this you'll find that there's some little pieces that will stay underneath the lines of stitching and what I do is I use a closed pair of sharp scissors and I just lay the scissors on that little piece that's underneath the stitching and it just pulls right out from underneath that stitching and so and you know especially on dark fabrics you really see the tiny pieces so you need to get all of those each and every time and it really is something that's very simple to do and it's so much easier than marking the design every time

Channel: LandauerPublishing

Views: 313,724

Rating: 4.8804512 out of 5

Keywords: Quilting, Machine Quilting, Quilting Stencils, Quilting Templates

Id: NyjDXLNFSV0

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2013