Your First Quilt. Start to Finish.

hi my name is cindy rang and i'm the owner of the fabric patch in ephrata washington and this is my granddaughter eliza and we sew together a lot we've put over 200 videos on youtube and maybe you've found some of them maybe you've found none of them but um we have a lot of different things there are series there's beginner quilts there's techniques there's you and i have done a beginner series with eight different projects so we've done a lot of stuff but we find that there's a lot of people who want to know all of the very basic steps from start to finish so that's what we're going to call this one we're going to call this this video your first quilt and we're going to cover all of the basic steps from cutting to piecing to putting borders on to quilting it and finishing everything now it is not really eliza's first quilt she's made quite a few but she's gonna we're gonna work through this together and kind of show you all of those steps right right okay my daughter and i have owned and operated a busy quilt shop in washington state for over 20 years we have a retreat center an active youtube channel and a large pattern line featuring our creations my two sons work on machines one daughter-in-law is our videographer and the other is a long-arm quilter we are a family that love each other we laugh together and every once in a while we get some work done we have a crew that are saints for their efforts at keeping us on track thanks for joining us on our wild ride all right so we really suggest that um if it's your first quilt you might consider pre-cuts because what happens is um a lot of the fabric companies have already done the work for you so they might go ahead and cut up some five inch squares for you or some 10 inch squares for you so depending upon what size you want the quilt to be you could do that that's actually what we're going to do today is we're going to use pre-cuts and we're going to make a smaller one out of this really pretty pastel flannel pre-cuts with pre-cuts when you get a packet they typically have 42 in them which is kind of nice because you can do six across by seven down so if you do the ten inch squares you're going to end up with a twin size quilt because you've got roughly three and a half yards of fabric there if you're doing the five inch you're going to end up with a good size baby quilt so it'll be nice so and you can always add borders and we're going to do that but i just want to just really briefly talk to you about some basic um cutting principles and so the thing with cutting is that you do need to have a good ruler that hopefully is not going to slip on you and you need to have a rotary cutter it's not to say that you couldn't use a template and use some scissors and cut things into squares but now this is what we use which is basically a razor blade on wheels so this is the one that i like to use and it'll automatically protect that blade when i'm not using it which is kind of nice and so the other thing you want to know is when you're cutting you are cutting right along the edge of the ruler and so we always position so that what we're cutting is underneath the ruler if that makes sense so what that means is i'm going to first cut off so that i have a nice clean edge here and i always make sure that i've cut all the way through before i move my ruler and so now that i've done that i have this nice clean edge i'm going to turn this around because i happen to be right-handed and normally what i would do in my sewing room is i would just walk around to the other side but just so i don't have my back to you i'm going to flip that over so now what i mean by positioning the ruler if i'm going to cut this into five inch strips what i'm going to do this is a six inch wide ruler so i'm going to come over to this line and i'm going to line that up on that nice straight edge right there see that yeah and then i'm going to put my hand right here so that nothing is going to slip and i'm going to cut make sure i've moved that oh see and did you see that so i have just a tiny little piece here that i haven't cut you want to cut that first and now i'm going to do my next one move this over and the reason why sometimes that very first cut doesn't cut all the way is because of where we put our rotary cutter you really want to start in front of the fabric so that you cut through that front part and all the way through looks like i might be able to get one more five inch strip out of here let's see oh i can i think i can alright because the keys the keys to successful quilting is accurate cutting accurate sewing which means your quarter inch seam allowance all of your math is dependent on that we're going to talk about that later and pressing and quality fabric but the rest of that we're all good okay so i've cut this into five inch strips and when you're reading a pattern what they're going to say to you is they will say cut it into strips then cross cut so what they mean by cross cut and i'm just going to lay these up here so you can see this so these are my width of fabric which is 42 inches so cross cut means that i'm going to cut across so i'm actually going to come across over here and cut this way so i'm going to break the rules by giving myself a nice clean edge up here taking these bits off and then i'm going to do that same thing i'm going to measure my five inches right on that edge this part that's okay because that's going to be that edge there and so it's okay what i'm looking for is i'm looking to make sure that this lines up here these line up so that everything stays nice and square so i'm going to cross cut and here's my five inch squares five inch squares five inch squares oops i have a tiny little thread i'm going to do the same thing and i have my line here that we can see and these lines see all right okay so let's talk about our pre-cut so when you get your pre-cut if you decide to go this route again you've got 42 of them sometimes you might have duplicate pieces in there if there's only 30 colors in the line or something but oftentimes you end up with 42 different ones so what will happen is you have to decide it's annoying yeah you have to decide how you want to line out your quilt we know that since there's 42 in here we're going to do six across by seven down right and again you can make it any size you want right you could add more five inch squares you could had one more six it less yeah you could do a smaller quilt it doesn't really matter so what we're going to do is we have a design wall so what this is is this is just a flannel grid it's on our website and i think it's called creative grid on our website and it's flannel these are two inch squares we've just put it on the on the we've wrapped a piece of foam core insulation board and so when we put our fabric up here it sticks so we can look at it we can also put pins in it sometimes if we need to so we use this all the time if you don't have space for this or you don't have one in your home you can easily just design your quilt on your floor i did that for forever and it works just fine as long as you can keep the cats out of the room that you're sewing in right okay so it looks like for this particular pack lunch it is kind it's um it's a it's a what's it called shadow play it's a shadow play flannel is what this is by maywood studios and it looks like you've got three three of each of each color so what's going to happen is she is going to overthink this for a long time because that's what we do and so she's going to lay these up here however she'd like to in in a row and so sometimes what i do is i will just take them off you know the way that they come off and put them in a row but what's going to happen is pretty soon we're going to run out of the just three and then you're going to have to decide so anyway i'm going to give these to her and um she's going to play around with these a little bit [Music] do [Music] [Music] all right so we feel like you could mess with this for forever and it doesn't matter you know there's nothing that you can do wrong you just play with it you can put a pattern or no pattern or a color if you only pick two colors that you want to cut into squares then that makes it kind of easy it's almost like a checkerboard pattern or you can do rows totally doesn't matter this is that whole part where what's so fun about the quilt is designing it picking your own fabrics doing your own things when you have something that's pre-cut though you have a lot of different fabrics and so you can do whatever you want you don't want to don't wait yeah so it's kind of fun just to lay it all out doesn't make any difference gonna be kind of fun so this is the design that she's um that she's picked so now what's gonna happen is we're going to sew the rose together so there are multiple ways to do this and we did a we did a quilt called size nine shoe and in that one we show you how to sew something together where when you're kind of sewing through a row you chain piece and it leaves a little piece and so sometimes when i sew a quilt like this together i will do that but if it's your first project we aren't going to recommend that what we're going to do instead is eliza is going to sew her top row together so she's going to sew this seam then this seam then this seam yeah and then when she presses it we're going to show you up close how she presses but we're going to press all of the seams going one direction then she's going to sew the next row and she's going to press all of those seams going the opposite direction because there's something called nestling and we'll show you how that works then she'll sew the next one opposite opposite then the next one and the next one and people ask all the time well why don't you just press your seams open well when you do clothing and different things you do press your seams open but your seam is a little bit stronger if you press it over to the side because the only thing that's between the outside world and your batting is the thread if you press it open but if you press it over it actually adds a little bit of stability and it helps you to be able to nestle those seams all right so we're going to set up a sewing machine and we're going to get [Music] started [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so we're on to step two so she was uh so and so and so in a way so let's take a look at what she did so what she did was what we talked about in the last time was she sewed all of her rows together and after she sewed all of her rows together what she did was she pressed them to one side so i'm going to flip these over so you can see these are pressed this way let's do a couple of them these then are pressed let me get that to stick there are pressed that way and that goes all the way down now she went ahead and used black thread part of that is because it was what was in the machine frankly the other part is so that you'd be able to see her quarter inch seam allowance but when we talk about thread you know the most important thing is to make sure you have a good quality thread and that your seam allowance is correct and that your stitch length is correct if you can see the thread color that you use you've already got stitch problems you could either have tension problems or maybe your stitches are too big so even though she used black thread with pastel you can't see it she's going to do a little clipping it's all going to be okay so it's not a huge deal and i've told everybody that i use white kind of a banana color a light gray a dark gray and black those are about the only color of threads that i ever use and so it doesn't really matter so anyway so now that she's done this and she's done her rose now it's time to go ahead and sew these together but i want to mention they may have seen you use these little guys so if you saw this these are called thermal thimble so if you were wondering what they were the way that i use them you get three in a set so there's a big one for a thumb there's one for your index finger and one for your middle finger i think you were using like what six or something four she was using four but what they're for is you put them on tight and then what happens is they're um as you're pressing when you're using your iron and you're holding your seam or you're doing something different or you're flipping something over that way if the iron gets a little bit close to your finger you don't burn your finger so it's weird the way they work it seems like they would plast that they're plastic it seems like they would melt yes they don't melt that's what they're for is they're i mean i wouldn't you know but but they they work really well i know yeah you wouldn't want to do that but they work great so that's what they're for they melt it yeah the other thing that i will use them for sometimes is when i'm doing hand stitching and you know when your needle kind of gets stuck because you've used a little too small of a needle or you have a lot of thick thread they're kind of grippy so it'll help you to grab that needle to pull that needle out so they're kind of fun they're inexpensive i don't know what they are five bucks maybe six i don't know what they are for um a set of three so they're kind of nice so that's what those were all right so her next step is she's going to sew these rows together so when she sews these rows together what she's going to do is do the top two rows and she's going to nestle her seams so what will happen is if we do a little close-up what happens is you can see here let me trim that little thread off so you can see it a little bit better so what happens when you nestle is one seam one pressing goes one way one goes the other way and so then what happens is it'll kind of lock in place right there it just fits perfectly just locks right into it and so um what will happen is it gives you this nice little spot where everything locks in here you're going to come down here to this one that one will lock in place that one and it's just kind of a natural thing it just sort of fits in place there and what you can do is you might we like binder clips we feel like they are easy on easy off the other thing is it doesn't distort anything when you're pinning through there but whatever you have is okay whatever you'd like to use or if you tend not to pin the truth is is that as you're sewing just kind of stop lock it together and as soon as you get here lock the next one and hold on to it lock the next one and hold on to it so what she's going to do is she's going to sew her first one she's going to add her next one then her next one and she's just going to keep going down the truth is you could do groups of two groups of four you could do it however you want to whatever makes sense to you for me i like to work off of again off of a design wall or off of the floor somewhere where i can sew it then look at it sew it then look at it so it can look at it so that i know what i'm doing and making sure that everything stays in place but we will see how you decide to do it and some and again i tend to put it up and up and down all the time so we'll watch you do it and i think we mentioned this before that this design wall i think it's called creative grid and it is a flannel two inch square if you have room for something like this it is kind of nice and it keeps the cats off of your project off of the floor but anyway all right so we're gonna let you sew your rows and then we'll be back to see the next step [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay so you did a good job so we got them all sewn together so this is a good time to mention that what she was working on was five inch squares so five inch pre-cut squares means that her quilt right now with all of them sewn together is roughly about 28 inches by about what 32 inches or something like that so because that's all you're working with is a few five inch squares if you were going to do 10 inch squares you would end up with a quilt that's about what 55 by 65 so a lot of it depends on the pre-cuts that you're using or if you're cutting your own squares and you're doing six inch or seven inch but anyway so what's going to happen is depending upon what you're doing with the quilt you'll add borders or you might be done with it but we have a whole video about borders it's probably gosh it's got to be 30 maybe 45 minutes long and we talk about measuring and why it's important to measure we talk about options for borders one thing that i think is kind of important though is that if you put your quilt together and you wish it were bigger you certainly have an opportunity to put a bunch of borders on it but if all of a sudden you do a 10 inch border all the way around it's going to be obvious that you wish you would have had more squares if that makes sense right because we have a great big border it's not going to be as interesting as your pieced quilt so this is just a small little quilt it's not going to be bigger unless you get another charm pack and add more rows right you don't want to no no you can do that with like 10 inch squares to make something a whole lot bigger all right so so what you can do is um where she's going to press this one more time and she might do a little bit of squaring up if you need to and what squaring up is is you're just going to put your ruler on it and just kind of shave off just to make sure that everything is nice and straight all the way around and then i'm not going to go into a lot of detail here because we have a whole long video about borders but what you're going to do is you're going to measure and so when you measure a cross so let's say that this is 32 and a half inches and down here is maybe 32 and a quarter inches it's not uncommon for your for them to be off by just a smidge just a little bit it's perfectly okay so then when you cut your pieces you cut them both exactly the same size and you always go with the bigger size so we're going to cut a cup 32 and a half inch piece and a 32 and a half inch piece whether that's a two inch border a three inch border whatever you want doesn't matter maybe your pattern is going to tell you something very specific but the truth is do what you want and then you're going to sew that on and press it open once you've put those borders on you're going to measure the other side let's pretend we have a little border here border here you're going to sew those on and then you're going to measure from there up and let's say it's 38 on this side and let's say that it's going to be 38 and a half on this side same thing you're going to cut two pieces that are 38 and a half the reason you always go with the bigger number is because it's easier to to find kind of that extra half inch across that 38 inches but to try to suck something together 38 and a half inches to suck that into 38 inches you end up with a pucker a tiny little fold but it's easier to get that extra so that's what's going to happen she's going to press it she's going to pick out a border cut her border measure this so she's going to sew on this one and this one press it measure so on this one and this one press it and then we're going to do the last step second to the last step she's going to quilt it and then after you quilt it we're going to bind it so we are we're probably halfway done even though we're done with the first step of four piecing your blocks borders quilting binding all right okay so see eliza when you're doing it all you're going to do is you're going to line this up so that it all comes out perfect seeing that one is all even how a cat would say is puff and then this one see this one comes over a little bit so you're just going to same thing here so see you're lining up this way and you can see over here see where that lines up like that okay when you're squaring up the big thing when you're squaring up is to keep your quilt square that's why they're calling it that is that everything stays nice and square and if there's weird little hangover bits from a row that just got a little bit wonky sometimes that happens doesn't really matter we're just going to kind of clean that up a little bit so what you do is you lay your ruler down so that you can see the edge and while you're doing that you're also looking over here to make sure that a seam that's straight you can find another line so that you can see that this is straight here this is all straight here this is straight where i've cut so you're keeping it square which is why they're calling it squaring up so all you're doing is when you're cutting that then you're just trimming off those weird little wonky bits that just kind of got away from us so that's what's happening so she's done that and so now we're going to go ahead and measure and see where we ended up so let's see here oops okay so let's measure and the only reason for this small quilt the only reason that we're measuring the lengthwise first is because um we can do that all in four strips of fabric because we're going to do one strip of fabric here because we've got about 42 inches to play with one here one on this side and one on that side if you did your short ends first you might be piecing a border if that makes sense does that make sense all right so let's go ahead and measure this bottom one let me help you and then we could probably fast forward through this part so we are at 32 32 and an eighth i'd say and then this one thirty two and the ninth w it's maybe two and an eight it's the same after we squared it up fantastic so every once in a while a quilt will come out exact so it did so that's pretty good so 32 and an eighth is her magic number so the two strips that we cut will be the same size and again if they don't come out the same that is perfectly normal and so then what would happen is you would choose your larger number and you've decided on a would you decide three inch two inch cut two and a half yeah all right so we're going to do two borders i'm just going to cut these for you real fast right so we're doing we're going to do two strips and i'm going to show them how to cut it so we've cut our two and a half inches and we're going to cut both our top border and our bottom border at exactly the same time so what we're going to do is lay these out together cut off our salvage and now we're going to measure 32 and an eighth and i always use my ruler for measuring but sometimes with borders you have to use your mat so 32 and an eighth i did not want to i know i'm right on the edge okay okay so once you've cut them what you're gonna do is i um i tend to be somebody who i don't pin a lot i just kind of feel ahead and i go ahead but i always pin borders always because otherwise all of your measuring if you just kind of start sewing you get to the end all of a sudden something weird will happen we don't know what it is but it does and so i always pin it and again you can pin or do you like pin or do it clips you like clips so then what you do is you you pin right at the edge one side and then you pin on the other side yep so that you know and then usually i'll also do in the center and depending upon how long the border is i might um put five or seven or whatever for this one and now i'm also going to put one right here do two more one goes here and then again we're just going to hold that out and one goes here so we've clipped or pinned that border on you'll do the same thing on the other side so that we'll press it and then we'll measure and do the other borders and then we'll be ready to quilt all right [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so she got her borders on which is really good and she decided on just one border so what you can do for yourself is you can do whatever you want to do sometimes you'll find that a pattern says you know you need one yard for one border that doesn't mean you have to stop there if you want to go ahead and make it a little bit bigger add a little more color do something else it truly doesn't matter you just want to make sure though that you have enough backing so if you bought backing based on what the pattern required and then you made it bigger that backing probably isn't going to fit so just make sure you've made those arrangements but she went ahead and just did a two inch border but you could have added a couple of borders if you want there is a little rule about borders and we mention it in that video and i think i talked about it earlier also that um if you've only pieced some small blocks but you really do want it to be bigger it's not that you couldn't add 10 inches worth of borders you just have to make sure that there's um there's that there's a lot going on so you might have a two inch border and then a four inch border and then another three inch border or something like that and as long as it looks pieced it'll look interesting but if you just put 10 inches of one fabric that always looks a little hokey i think so anyway all right enough about borders so now it's time to turn it into what we call a quilt sandwich and a quilt sandwich is the top the batting and the backing we really do call it that that seems weird right yeah it's called a sandwich and so you say they'll sometimes even say you sandwich your quilt together so that's what we're gonna do so she has picked this beautiful flannel as her backing and since this quilt is only like 33 by 40 she's able to go ahead and use just regular fabrics just have to piece anything so we know that a 42 inch wide fabric will work so this is her backing and then a batting and batting is very personal some people will just put a piece of flannel in there some people will do different things some people don't put batting in and i think the only time that i see that is when they have minky on the back but i really like batting i think that have something soft and squishy i think it holds up a little bit better so i like batting and you can decide how how heavy you want your batting to be so there is cotton cotton works really well cotton is breathable it's flat it's kind of quilty it's sort of nice you can choose polyester polyester is lofty and so it'll make it kind of a fluffier quilt that works kind of well another option is a fusible batting and you can get something that's fusible on one side or fusible on both sides and what that works for is if you want to hold everything together while you're quilting and so sometimes that's kind of nice i'll kind of show you how that works but all that little fusible stuff it does wash out it's not it's not harmful in any way it just makes it a little bit easier so when we get to that part we'll show you the other thing is that if you're kind of undecided um the warm company puts out this little flyer and this is just the battings that they do um but there's other companies that make batting but you can kind of feel the different thicknesses of cotton the different thicknesses of batting and it'll also kind of describe it they give these to us for free if you order something from us just put in the notes that you'd like a flyer and we'll throw one in for you and it talks about how far far apart you want the quilting so the thing with the quilting is that when it's time to sew things together the reason that we quilt it is we're holding that quilt sandwich together right and so if you have your quilt top your batting and your backing and all you're going to do is just do maybe a little bit of quilting maybe you're going to tie it and you put a couple of ties here and maybe down here what happens is the quilt kind of shifts a little bit and so um it it just doesn't look it doesn't look right because the top will move and sometimes the batting even in the inside will move a little bit if you've ever had a quilt and after it's been washed multiple times you feel that you have this funny little wad of batting down and you've probably never have you ever seen a quilt like that before no because you have quilters in your family yes but other people you might go to somebody else's house and you'll find this funny little wad of something down in the corner of the quilt it's because they didn't quilt it enough and if you don't quilt it enough to hold that batting where it's supposed to go it will fall down to the corner after you've washed it i don't know five six times seven eight times a while but eventually what will happen is it kind of falls apart and so that's why you have to quilt it and that's what this little thing will tell you is it does tell you kind of how far apart but as a general reference reference you probably want within five inches and so i just kind of think about using your hand and so with this as long as you're kind of quilting on the lines or near the lines if you were going to tie it you could tie in each of the corners if you're going to quilt stitching in the ditch you could do that you could do a bunch of different things but you just want to make it close enough together that it holds that quilt sandwich all stays together does that make sense yeah okay all right we're going to clean this up for a second we're going to lay it out okay so what we did is uh eliza selected the polyester batting which is again kind of a little bit lofty and so you just always want to make sure that you have i don't know six to eight inches extra all the way around because when you start pinning and you start quilting things will kind of drift just a little bit they slip just a little bit so you just want to make sure you have that extra space and then you'll end up trimming that off afterwards and we'll show you that if you are taking your quilt to a long armor um somebody who's going to machine quilt it for you same idea you don't have to do the quilt sandwich thing you just take them your top take them your backing and your batting and just make sure though that you've done the math so that you have at least six inches some ask for eight but six inches all the way around so you have extra for them to pin on and do all of their quilting but for us we're going to go ahead and we're going to do something called stitching in the ditch stitching stitching in the ditch it's kind of a fun thing and so typically whenever you're doing it yourself and you're going to either machine quilt or tie or big stitch or hand quilt or or stitch in the ditch whatever you're doing you have to baste your quilt you can pin based or stitch based and stitch based you can take a i should have brought one back here but it's a curved needle and what you do is you're just going to take great big huge stitches and you stitch stitch stitch stitch stitch and you just do this big old long stitch in there so that everything stays together the reason i didn't bring it is i i hardly ever do that um um i don't know why if you do um stitch basting my best advice is to use kind of a garish color of thread something like for this i would do like a lime green or a bright red or something because you want to see that thread that thread will come out when you're done what i usually do is i'll pin based if i'm going to do that and the pins that work best if you have adult fingers are actually these and these are funny little they're called quilters pins and they're funny little safety pins that are bent so the they look like this and the reason that they're bent is because what's actually going to happen is you're going to go down and it helps you to go ahead and grab a hold of that and it comes right back up and then you're able to pin it but what happens is even for adult fingers it's kind of cumbersome to get that pin and they actually have little tools to help you click it and help you unclick it but what i always suggested when brianna was little was regular straight pins and what i would say is that make the decision for yourself what you'd like to use if you'd like to use these then that's great if not the only thing you want to keep in mind about these is that they're pokey and so if this is what you decide to use then you just have to remember that it's got that little pokey end on it but what was happening is when brianna would do her quilting as you're quilting you take the pins out and she just had a really hard time with look at your little fingers so she had a really hard time kind of getting these out as she was going so she liked these so we'll let you try a couple things and see what you like but again you can stitch based safety pin based or straight pin based but what you do is you're just going to go through here and you just want to make sure that you're going through all of the layers in fact i'm going to move this for a second so that they can see what the other thing that happens is you want to make sure that your back has all been pressed and is all nice and flat if you have some funny little crease in there that crease is going to be stuck in there so you want to make sure everything is flat and this is nice and little so our little table here works fine but if you have a bigger quilt really the best place to do this is on the floor just on a hard floor is nice because what the idea is you're going to go through and come out go through and come out whether you're using these these or that curved needle and so what you do is you start in the center so you start in the center and i usually put my hand in there let me get my pins again so you start in the center and you don't have to have to do a ton of these but i would say like one in each one of your blocks or maybe on the sides here but what you're trying to do is you just want them all you just want everything to be kind of nice and flat and you start in the center and you work your way out so i'm going to do it and then i'm going to turn it over to you but you just and see when you're doing it on the table i can tell that i hit the table and then i'm going to come up and the best thing is to make sure all of your points are going one direction so that you'll know not to run your hand this way or you could be poked and see they're kind of deep in there so it's not going to be super terrible but you just come out about a hand's width and you just kind of smooth everything and see i've got them about a hands width apart and i'm just going from the center all over the place yep and working out and we'll just have to see what you think what you like the best we're just smoothing it [Music] um we're going to mention one other thing here as we continue on this my grandmother and the reason she always used the straight pins was because it was what she had she wasn't going to invest in some you know newfangled fancy things but what she would do is she would then bury her point so see what happens if you go in again then your point goes in i tend not to do that just because i think we just need to be aware don't don't be fooled that your point is not going to hurt you so but it's just one of those things you can do is if you back up and then see where your point is just kind of bury that point in there a little bit and then if you do accidentally run your hand across you're not going to be poked so grandma used to do that for me i have to admit i did not do that [Music] okay so um so quilting pins if we didn't measure this before quilting pins tend to be an inch and three quarter you can also get two inch pins and so um again we always have them on hand that's why we kind of like it it seems to work well but we always suggest that you choose the tool that works best for you and whatever gives you the best results you don't necessarily have to buy those little bent pins if you don't want them but again there's pros and cons both ways i just find arthritis these are difficult and then people then they need to buy the 12 tool and then they need to buy the other tool and when if you are cautious these work okay so notice that all these pins are going one direction so she's going to be aware of that the entire time she's sewing so now again she can tie the quilt and typically if you decide to tie sometimes people will tie the quilts because maybe some of their corners came out exactly right and maybe some other corners didn't and so what will happen is if you tie it then it can hide that the other thing is some people might decide to machine quilt and we did a little series on i think it's called how to finish or now it's time to finish your quilt or whatever and i think we did seven different mug rugs and i did seven different i did a big stitch a hand quilting stitch in the ditch free motion machine i don't know i did a bunch of tying i did a bunch of them so if you're not sure what to do you can review that series but um i think for you what i would suggest that you do is stitching in the ditch stitching in the ditch was the first thing that i well i started hand quilting the deal with hand quilting is that it takes a very long time and if you're doing something small that's fine but oftentimes somebody's first quilt is kind of a big bed quilt and you know if it takes you a year to finish it you're not so sure you like quilting right so stitching in the ditch is kind of fun it's pretty easy to do and um that's what i'm going to suggest for you i did that a lot before i got the long arm and brianna did that a lot that was what we did mostly because it holds the quilt together really well um we just sort of liked it so part of it is we have a little foot we're going to show you so we're going to go ahead and put a foot on get set up we're going to be under the machine and then we're going to show you the stitches this is the stitch in the ditch foot and you can see that what's happened is there's this little line that goes right through the center of it this happens to be for a faff foot but of course for whatever your machine is i would assume that they're going to make these okay so this color is color number 2123 in aurifil and it is a really good color it's kind of a banana yellow sort of but what's really nice is when you have pastel colors it's the coolest thing because you can see that it looks lavender on the lavender it looks peach on the peach it looks green on the green it looks purple on the purple pink on the pink even blue on the blue it's the weirdest thread it just sort of absorbs that color there is a gray one i think it's color number 2026 a dark gray that does the same thing for all of your dark colors so if you have a quilt that has brown navy blue purple those sorts of things it does the same thing it just sort of absorbs the color so this pale banana yellow and a slate gray are the two best colors for your top stitching the other thing about stitching i just want to show you really quick is i want to show you how your needle threader works now again we sew on a faff this happens to be a faff 3.0 but all of our fast machines every single one has the exact same needle threader and i've seen this same needle threader on vikings and husqvarnas and brothers and so people say all the time oh gosh i never knew how that thing worked so let me just kind of show you oops i've got a little tangled here so once you are threaded and you're down to the needle what you do is you pull this thing down and the thing that you want to know is your needle has to be in the up position and what the machine says is up so don't reach over and touch your hand wheel just hit your needle up position or as soon as you turn it on and it kind of you know loads and stops in its up position that's where this thing is set so if not if you turn this and your needle is not in the right spot there's a little filament in there that will break and then it doesn't work your local dealer can fix that takes just a second to fix and he just has to replace that little part in there anyway so what you do is you come down and see over here there's a little hook you're going to come over and you're going to hook your thread right there and then you're going to come down all the way and push that down there's a little spring push that down as you push that down you can see that this thing back butts right up against your needle and you can see there's two there's little teeth there's teeth on one side and on the other side so i'm just going to come back over hold on my thread came out i'm going to push that down and we're going to go right underneath those teeth and as soon as i let go it has pulled the thread through to the back so then i just have to reach in pull that i have a super long thread and i'm good to go and my needle is threaded so that's how you use your needle threader all right so i have my needle threaded with my special thread and then what's going to happen is first and i have the stitch in the ditch needle on here the other thing i should have mentioned is that we had talked about that fusible batting this is the other reason why people like fusible batting and it comes in all sizes but if you just wanted to press everything down or use spray baste it like um sullivan's has one um um what's the other one called nine fifty five nine five oh five five oh five i you can tell i don't use that very often 505 works good um so there's a bunch of other there's a bunch of things to try to make basting easier all right so now eliza is going to be stitching in the ditch so what you do want to do is just like you're pinning from the center you're going to start stitching in the center and what happens with this with this um foot is that as soon as you start stitching oh that's right your petal is in a weird place as soon as you start stitching see that little guy right there and eliza where are you coming up here looking so what's happening is as you're stitching that is just going to ride right in the center and that's right where your needle is so you're just going to stitch down and what's going to happen is you're going to come down this way going to turn around go up the other way turn around go down the other way and you're going to do all of your horizontal rows or vertical rows and then you're going to turn around do the other side so what you want to know is that these pins you they're going to point in all different directions so they're going to first point towards you then maybe they're going to point away from you at some point they're going to point to the side as you get down closer and as you've come and you've done most of your side ones you can go ahead and take those out it's just to make sure that everything stays where it's supposed to and oftentimes when i'm working my way down i'm just going to kind of smooth that out so that i know that underneath everything is going together and so again all i'm going to do is i'm just going to stitch down that way the other thing that sometimes i'll do is i actually do make a little bigger stitch so when we turn this machine on the automatic stitch is a 2.5 and i've gone up to a three you don't need it to be super close together when all you're doing is stitching these two layers together you can go ahead and have a little bit bigger stitch but you're just going to go down and what will happen is as long as that is staying in that line that's what's going to happen is it's going to stitch right in that line and you're not going to see it at all and that's why it's called stitching in the ditch you're stitching in the ditch created by the two so that's what's going to happen you're going to try not to poke yourself and if you feel like we do need to bury these we can and we'll leave these down you're going to come down you're going to turn around and go up turn around and go down and then when you do that you can take these pins out so you're only going to deal with the pins while you're doing one row and then when you're turning around and you're going the other direction you don't have to deal with the pins anymore so and that's why i want you to see when you get in here when it comes time to take this out see what you think but again some people love these they wouldn't ever use anything else some people love these wouldn't use anything else some people just don't want to mess with either one and they do the fusible batting so it's just good to know all right i'm going to turn it over to you i'm going to stand here and watch you a little bit [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so eliza thought she was stitching so well that um she couldn't even see it but her needle came unthreaded so all of her really good stitching was without thread that's how it always goes so anyway i know so now we're gonna start back over here and what you'll do eliza is just go ahead and backstitch a little bit right there since you're starting right there okay and then we took those take those pins out but i feel like you'll probably be okay just kind of keep it kind of smooth right there and i think yeah you'll be all right just only go a little bit and then just yeah just make sure you're not pulling anything you'll be all right [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] another option for this exact quilt is you don't have to stick with five inch squares this is ten inch squares same idea done exactly the same way this one has a different border on it this one happens to be out of minky and just quilted a little bit differently so it doesn't matter what size your block 5 inch or 10 inch or if they are pieced blocks that you've made maybe you've made a nine patch shoe maybe you've made a tri-dazzle whatever this is how you would sew them all together all right so she did a fantastic job pretty much kind of on our own we checked on her quite a bit and she did a really really good job so now it's time to put on her binding so we do have um an uh an additional video that is all about bindings and again those little quilts when we did all of the little hand quilting machine quilting stitching in the ditch we did the little mug rugs we then took those same ones and we did all kinds of different bindings so there's a binding tutorial and if you want something a little bit more specific you can kind of look through there and decide what you want to do we want to show you our two favorites one favorite is bringing our backing over to be part of our binding and if you do that what you need to do is you need a pair of scissors and you're just going to come along and you're going to cut the binding off first i mean the batting the batting off first and you just want to be kind of careful when you cut that and you can throw away little bits that aren't going to be anything but sometimes you end up with a piece that's big enough for a mug rug or a coaster so we kind of hang on to those of course because that's what quilters do is hold on to bits of fabric and then once you do that what you would do and you would do that all the way around and then you would lay your ruler out and a lot of it sort of depends for me the magic number is one inch and i'm just going to do a tiny little bit of this this is not what she chose to do but i just want to show you that what you would do is you would line this up cut out an inch and you would do the same thing all the way around i'm just going to go ahead and cut this off to get it out of the way it's an odd shape for my hand and then what you end up doing is you just fold this over and fold this over put your little binder clips on it and then all you have to do then is just sew right on that just kind of close to that and sew the whole thing down and you have something that looks like this double fold binding that's adorable yeah right it's kind of cute so that is an option um the other option is you just do the same thing except what you would do is you cut everything off cut your binding i think this is what she's prepared maybe she's changing her mind but she's picked this and then you just cut this two and a half inches sew it on or again there's a couple other options but the binding is that last step the other final thing is the label we feel like labels are very very very important because quilts are quilts last for a very very long time and they are historical within our families and so it's important to say what you should put on every quote label is who made it where you lived when you made it and the date and so this label would at least say eliza rang ephrata washington and then i would just put february 2021 if there's something additional you want to say who it's for what it is a bible verse there's all kinds of things you can put on them but at a very minimum you want to say um those three things so we'll do that and then we just want to show you just for a really quick second we want to show you what her second quilt will be because if you've sewn these squares together and thought well that was kind of fun but what if i want to do something different this is her second version and so the idea is here's those same five inch squares but now they're on point alternating and then we've got our side setting and our corner setting so she's going to work on this one next that'll be another video that'll be coming up if you feel like you can't wait until she's done then we did talk about that exact quilt in the row sampler series class number seven it's a series of 14 and it's class number seven of 14 and you can watch that but otherwise um we're going to let eliza get this binding on and we'll show you the finished picture at the end thanks a lot eliza you did a good job she's inspirational [Music] thank you for watching our video we invite you to leave a comment hit the like button or better yet subscribe to our channel so you never miss an episode you can also visit our instagram twitter facebook or pinterest pages or find all of those things and our online store at fabricpatch.net

Channel: The Fabric Patch

Views: 26,464

Rating: 4.9448276 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Zg0w9VwwEd4

Length: 77min 43sec (4663 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021