Posts Tagged ‘patchwork quilting tips & techniques’
Patchwork Quilting Hand Quilting
I have noticed over my 30+ years of patchwork quilting that many quilters try to put their quilt into their hoop or frame too tightly and then wonder why they cannot get nice small, even stitches.
Here is a great, short little video that will show you HOW to achieve those hand quilting stitches yourself and some other articles you might like to take a look at too! Read the rest of this entry »
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Raw Patchwork Quilting
Rawed EDGED patchwork quilting that is. The other day I shared with you my “I Love Lucille” quilt. She was done entirely raw edged, meaning that I did not turn under ANY of the raw edges when I did the applique, OR the reverse sawtooth “binding”.
As you can see, I have simply cut square the size I wanted… I “auditioned” several sized by simply folding them in half around the edge of the finished, all raw edges matching, quilt until I got the size I thought looked best. I laid them in place, overlapping them to be sure to cover all the raw edges. I did not measure anything, I simply “eyeballed” them so that the peaks were relatively even. This was a GREAT way to use those scraps I couldn’t part with! I used Dutch Java’s from Holland… some from Japan… hand dyes… they were simply too ’scrumtious’ to throw away any interesting bit! Start a pile for your raw edged binding!
If you look really closely (click on the picture for a larger view) you will see that they are held in place by my freehand quilting in my own handwriting. This is relatively easy to do, it just takes some practice. I drop my feed dogs and simply quilt whatever I want to say… it’s great for journaling on your patchwork quilting!
I once quilted an entire love letter to my husband, Michael, on a “challenge quilt” I will share with you another time… it hangs in his office and no one has a clue that it is a love letter! It’s our little secret! Of course I was careful not to say anything I really wouldn’t care to have read!
Not into raw edged binding yourself? It actually is great for an art quilt but I would never use it on one meant to be cuddled under… unless one wants the frayed looked after its washed… remember those jackets & sweatshirts people made intending that? Okay, now I am dating myself. This piece hung in my home a really long time, and it has never frayed at all.
Wondering what “real” sawtooth looks like?
- tressie’s quilt – wedding gift – the sawtooth binding edge is meticulous. i used to use this as a quilt on our bed and also on the guest room bed. i also used it as a wall quilt above our bed briefly at our vacation house. now i try to keep it in storage so the …
Patchwork Quilting on DRUGS!
LOL, did THAT title get your ATTENTION? BUT hallucinogenics, as you will soon see with your own eyes, DID have an effect on my patchwork quilting! It was a wonderful exercise in freeing our minds to SEE! NO, we did NOT take the drugs… read on and you will see too!
Now my husband always marvels at the workings of my mind… at least I keep him confused at best! LOL, so today, I was doing some research for the blog… and stumbled across an article in the NY Times and saw the author quote a NASA study from 1995 about the effect of drugs on spiderwebs…
Okay so now you are saying…. as Michael would, or used to (he knows better now after 32+ years) what the HECK does THAT have to do with patchwork quilting??? Well, Michelle Slatalla’s article actually was about her new sewing machine!
Her article sparked my memory of the Quilt Surface Design Symposiums that I attended in Columbus, Ohio, for years, and in particular the one I was at in 1995! Okay, I will tell you about QSDS, but in another post… later… remind me if I end up like the spiders on drugs!
That year I studied for two full weeks with Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, (more on him later too) literally all but living in the studio about 16+ hours a day and Arturo brought in a wonderful collage artist to guest teach for a couple days … his name is Carlton Wing… and Carlton had us do a wonderful project working with…. YOU got IT! Spiders on DRUGS!
This was a NASA project conducted and released earlier that year that literally studied the effects that different drugs had on how spiders spun their webs. Well we studied the subsequent webs with an artist’s eye! First as a collage artist, because we, as quilters are just collage artists that happen to work in fabric instead of paper, and then translating them, if we liked into quilts. While I never found the time for the translation into a quilt it was a FABULOUS exercise in looking for inspiration EVERYWHERE and THEN making it your OWN… so I thought I would share it with you today! CLICK on the LINK below (or the title above) to CONTINUE… Read the rest of this entry »
Patchwork Quilting BASIC; HOW to thread a needle!?
Patchwork Quilting wonders… did you know that there is a correct way to thread a needle???
Yes, there is! First off, you should always thread your needle with the end of the thread that comes off the spool first. That way you are not fighting the natural twist of the thread.
The other thing you should ALWAYS keep in mind is NEVER thread more than 18″ at a time! Any more than that and you will be fraying the thread as it runs through your fabric, risking breakage over time.
So next time you thread YOUR needle for patchwork quilting, sewing on a buton, or anything else, remember, no more than 18″ and put the end coming off the spool through the eye of the needle first, knotting the other end after cutting it off the spool. This is particularly true with your quilting thread for hand quilting! This will help to insure that your stitches stay in your quilt for GENERATIONS!
I Need WHAT TOOLS for Patchwork Quilting?
I need WHAT to get started Patchwork Quilting???
What are the essential, basic, cannot live without tools for patchwork quilting???
Face it, if we all lived in a perfect world we would have everything we want, when we want it.
But since we live in the REAL world lets be REALISTIC and see what you REALLY need… so CLICK on the LINK below to GET STARTED! And I think this post is so important that you will find a PAGE devoted to it! Read the rest of this entry »
How MUCH Patchwork Quilting Fabric?!
How MUCH patchwork quilting fabric to BUY? Hmmm… that age old dilemna! Buy as MUCH as you can afford! LOL, that’s our usual answer! But unfortunately one cannot always afford as much patchwork quilting fabric as we might like!
I am warning you right now, if you are into particulars and absolutes you are not going to like my answer, so move on and I’ll see you tomorrow… because buying patchwork quilting fabric is an emotional thing and never absolute!
I personally love what always turn out to be expensive fabrics… importeds, handmades, you name it. But I just have to have them! When I moved 8 years ago I couldn’t afford to ship all my fabrics in my studio so I sucked it up and donated the regular domestics [okay, for the most part] and shipped all the others. It was a great ‘nudge’ to get me to really evaluate my own collection! That nursing home still sends me stuff! LOL! But since I like those, and because I love challenges, and think that the more fabrics I can stuff into one of my art quilts the better, I usually only buy about 1/2 to a yard of any one of them. Some I know will only be the “pop” in a quilt so I might settle on a 1/4 [never a fat as I like to rotary cut] quarter if my pile at the cutting counter is already piled high.
But that is me, what do YOU buy? Read the rest of this entry »
Patchwork Quilting Fabric Stash!
We all have our patchwork quilting fabric stash. But why is it that we are ALWAYS buying MORE fabric? While it is fun to just buy MORE, it is better to buy more SMART…
First off I bet just about every experienced quilter will tell you that they got a LOT more discerning in WHAT they buy as their patchwork quilting matured. We all have pieces in our stash we will never use for that very reason… or we have realized it, as I did 8 years ago when I moved, and donated all that fabric to a local nursing home that has a patchwork quilting ‘program’. You will buy things that you wonder why you did too, its inevitable, but maybe we can keep some of that from happening.
First off ONLY buy GOOD QUALITY fabric. I know its a great sale and that piece is a bargain… BUT it is NOT a bargain if you end up never using it. Please do not use the ‘but its only going on the back’ or its only muslin! If the back of your quilt wears out or pills what happens to the entire quilt? Your TIME is too valuable. Buy good quality fabric; you will be very glad you did.
Patchwork Quilting COLOR!
When planning your patchwork quilting COLOR makes such a huge difference, not only in how it LOOKS, but in how it makes one FEEL!
Take a few minutes and peruse your own patchwork quilting fabric stash… and we’ll quickly review the elements of COLOR…
It’s a known fact that colors can affect your mood, make you feel a certain way, heck even make you hungry!
It is no coincidence that McDonald’s has RED French fry boxes!
RED makes a person want to eat, it stimulates the saliva glands, it increases your heartbeat and breathing.
It is the most emotionally intense color. Maybe that is why it is the color of love! Red will attract a lot of attention in patchwork quilting so make sure your piecing or appliqué is precise! RED will make you feel warm! BUT it can also make you feel ANGRY! So use it well; its a great color for political quilts to make a point!
The opposite COLOR on the color wheel is Read the rest of this entry »
Patchwork Quilting; Pick it APART!
With two patchwork quilting books new to the market, Gwen Marston’s “Liberated Quiltmaking II” and Jinny Beyer’s “The Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns:4050 Pieced Blocks for Quilters” [see previously posted reviews] I thought it a good time to talk a little about how one analyzes patchwork quilting by in a sense picking them apart. Knowing how to do that makes it easier to begin to make your own patterns rather than always relying on purchased ones. Now I know, patterns make it easy, I myself published a line of patchwork quilting patterns for over 25 years, but once you can look at any quilt block, decide what are the bare bones of the block… then the gloves come off and YOU are in charge!
There are major divisions that just about any good quiltmaking book or class will teach you. The first is patchwork quilting that is called one patch. That is when you use only one template for the entire quilt! That one shape will usually be a square, triangle, or a hexagon. Depending on fabric colorations and placement you can end up with an overall design. Think of the pattern “Grandmother’s Flower Garden” and you have pictured a one patch quilt made up of only one size hexagon!
When you get into patchwork quilting that are quilts made up of many duplicate blocks each block can be analyzed, broken down, into it’s main elements so that you can figure out what each section is made up of and how you might either totally duplicate it, or, if you are adventurous, change out the elements that you don’t quite like as well to replace them with your own! After all that is how Read the rest of this entry »
Patchwork Quilting; Binding YOUR Quilt
While we have talked about the why of patchwork quilting I was asked yesterday about a HOW. So today I am going to talk about HOW and WHY I bind my quilts the way I do. I think the way I bind my quilts is the most efficient, and I think, but haven’t taken an actual poll, the way most quilters do.
First off I do not use bias binding. I find that unless one has lots of curves on their quilt that it is simply unnecessary. I use cross grain binding, meaning I cut my strips across the 44″ of the fabric, from selvage to selvage,BUT I remove the selvage edge as it is always a tighter weave that will always launder differently than than the rest of the material. I don’t want sections of the binding to pucker! I measure around the outside of my quilt and add another foot or so to determine how much binding I will need in total. Divide that by the 42″ or whatever width your binding fabric is will tell you how many strips you will need to cut. I cut my strips each 1-1/2″ wide. That means that once I fold the strip in half for double fold binding, & sew the front with a 1/4″ seam that I have about 5/8″ to fold over and hand sew to the back of the quilt depending on the thickness of my batting. I know I will always have enough to turn over to easily cover my sewing line from attaching the binding to the front of the patchwork quilting. Take the number of strips you need to get around the quilt x 1-1/1″, add enough to “true up” your fabric for rotary cutting the strips and you now know how much fabric you need to buy for the binding of your quilt.
Now I rotary cut anytime I can so if you are not sure of how to “true up” your fabric give me a holler and we can talk about that too. I always gave a free mini-seminar on how to rotary cut to all new students & you didn’t get into my rotary patchwork quilting classes without it! No flying V’s in my classes!
I am going to suggest that you watch this video on YouTube for the actual sewing of the binding. Patchwork Quilting; How to Bind a Quilt Connecting Threads does a great job and their videos are very clear and concise and I hope you enjoy it.
One thing I sometimes do differently is 
