I don't know how this happened; my best guess is that I wrote down the numbers wrong after using the binding calculator, but I fiddled and twiddled until I actually got a diagonal seam on the binding strips with about 1/2 inch to spare.
This is a modified version of the fabulous Entropy Quilt (photo is one block of 16). The recipient chose the colors. I wish the pink were deeper-- the original colors are balanced for intensity and make the quilt pattern amazing-- it almost seems to move. But anyway, this is what she wants and I'm about to send it to a long-armer. Thread color is always difficult for me. I usually like it to blend in, but that's not possible here. I'm kind of leaning toward a pale pink, but I jut don't know! Ideas?
Also, I have always used pure cotton batting, but the long armer only provides Hobbes 80/20. Her prices include the batting. If you send your own, she will use it, but without discount. So I want to know-- why use a blended batting? The fabric I've used on the top and backing are Art Gallery fabrics, very soft and drapey. I can add my own Quilter's Dream cotton batting (in pure white) to the package, but I wonder if the long armer knows something I don't know about batting. Does 80/20 work better in a long arm? Is it just cheaper?
My city posted a request to its social media account asking us to be more careful disposing of sharp things, including sewing needles and pins. Here is my cute little sewing room sharps container. I just used a hammer and chisel to cut the slot and then bent the underside a teeny bit with s screwdriver before banging it flat. No, I did not serge or bind the raw edge. If it ever gets full I can empty it into a special collection bin made for sharps.
I've been helping to clear out a house where a quilter lived. She had a hoarding problem and ended up in a nursing home after a fall. I sorted the sewing supplies for the family, what could be sold or donated, and what has no value. The family gave me a closet full of unopened high quality batting (seriously, I have enough to last years) and I wanted to do something nice for them so when I found her most recent project, I decided to finish it for her. My quilting is not inspired, but it's done and trimmed. Here it is up on my wall. I found some fabric in my stash that I think will be perfect for the binding and I'll get that done today. The other picture is a quilt that I agreed to repair for an elderly man in my neighborhood. I really hate repairing quilts because they usually are at the end of their useful lives and it feels like wasted effort. But this is a really nice man and his daughter made the quilt for him when she was in high school and I couldn't say no. The quilt was oddly made, without binding, and lots of the seams had come apart. I reinforced seams with fused interfacing and then quilted over them. He chose fabric for the binding and I added it. The quilt had not been washed for a long time and I was so glad when I got to launder it. It's the second photo, laid out on my couch and ready to be returned.
There is a cautionary tale from the hoarder house. It felt so sad to see all the fabric and notions. This lady bought good stuff; Schmetz needles, Mettler thread, dozens of snips and scissors. Boxes and bags of fabric, mostly all ruined by mice. She had woven labels made with her name on them, so I will add that when I do the binding.
A friend has asked me to make simple covers for cambros: those large, plastic urns that keep coffee hot for catered events. Apparently the suppliers charge outrageous amounts for them. She needs them made of thick polyester knit fabric to resist staining and have enough stretch to fit easily over the urns. I’ve never sewed with this type of fabric before. My machine can do a stretch stitch and I can overcast the edges. I have ballpoint needles and I ordered stretch ballpoint needles, but it is not clear to me whether I should use plain ball points or stretch needles, and what stitch should I use? My Juki HZL DX7 has all the stitches. I could also go to the library and use the Janome serger. Please advise!
My tank is as far away from the kitchen as you can get in my house and a 20% water change is 5 gallons, so I had to figure something out to save my aching back. I bought tubing long enough to run from the tank to the sink, put a cheap pump on one end and a Python hook on the other. I marked the 5-gallon level inconspicuously on the tank. The hook holds the tubing safely in the sink and I pump out 5 gallons of water. While that’s happening, I am filling a 5-gallon bucket in the sink. Then I drop the pump in the bucket and put the hook into the tank (it comes with a diverter) dechlorinate, adjust the temperature, and pump the water from the bucket to the tank. The most time-consuming part of the process is draining and coiling up the tubing when I’m done. But the whole process is fast and painless.
The temp in my Cory tank went from 76 degrees to 89. I added a clip-on aquarium fan and after a few hours it was down to 82. You do need a supply of distilled water to keep topping it up.
Does anyone know where I can buy these? Or even what they are called? The little cords sewn into the shoulder seam of a dress that can be looped and snapped around bra straps to keep them away from an open neckline? I know I could hack something together, but I'd rather buy cords with snaps already sewn in.
You all are killing me! There was a recent thread about the hatred of basting. If I hadn't learned how to baste quilts on the wall, I don't think I'd be making anything larger than a baby quilt. Even if you have an enormous table, horizontal basting means you're fighting gravity to avoid wrinkles. Vertical basting makes gravity your friend.
If you have a vertical basting setup, it will take you less than 10 minutes to baste a queen sized quilt, you will never have to crawl on the floor, and the sandwich will be perfect.
The basting setup can be done in different ways. There are only 2 required elements. You need an empty wall bigger than the quilt top, and you need to be able to secure the layers with thumbtacks along the top. It you can attach flannel or fleece to the wall, so much the better, and a cork strip along the top will make it easier to use the thumbtacks. If you are hypersensitive to aerosols, I have seen videos of a quilter who does the basting on an exterior wall. Another solution is to baste vertically without spray adhesion, using safety pins by themselves.
I nailed foam core panels to the wall, sticky side up, peeled off the waxy paper, and adhered flannel to them. I put a strip of cork along the top because foam core doesn't take thumbtacks well. Kate (Last Homely House) uses a big panel of styrofoam, and I think that is probably the cheapest and best way to do it. You can also put finish nails up along the top of the wall and use curtain clip rings to hang all three layers. If the quilt is really large, you will need a stepladder.
Let the sandwiching begin: Smooth the backing to the wall, wrong side up. If you don’t have flannel, use thumbtacks along the top and painter's tape all around the perimeter. Spray heavily with Odiff 505. It's not permanent; you can reposition a layer if you get it wrong. Pat the batting into place. An extra set of hands is nice, but not needed. At this point, even if you have flannel, use thumbtacks to secure the 2 layers along the top because they will come in handy for the final step if they are already in place. Spray the batting. Remove the thumbtacks one at a time and pin the quilt top to the wall. I try to keep it from sticking at this point, but you can reposition it if needed. Working from the center out, pat the top into place in columns. Straight down the middle, then the sides. Pat gently at first, and when you are sure all the wrinkles are out, add some pressure. This is the moment when you realize that gravity is your friend. The quilt top will stay a couple of inches away from the batting until you get it right where you want it, and then you pat it down.
There'a another way to do the sandwich. After getting the backing all smoothed onto the flannel, you can attach both the batting and the flimsy with thumbtacks along the top before spraying. Then do the spray-and-pat in vertical columns, by ducking under the layers. Duck under the top 2 layers and spray the backing in a column down the middle. Duck out from under the batting and smooth down the middle. Then do the sides. Repeat for the top. I have found that I can avoid the ducking process even working alone.
Once I've got this part done, I add safety pins at intervals because I want to manhandle it without worry.
There are lots of videos about different ways to do this. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFqfYQdyzo8
I can't take it! Mt. Scrapmore is getting purged one way or another. All the fabrics are good quality quilting cotton. These are not crumbs. Most of them are at least 3 inches or bigger. And there are a lot of strips from trimming excess backing. Send me a DM with your mailing address.
I love binding! These are the steps that work for me— everyone is different. The basic thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to binding, it is more difficult to fix an inaccuracy later on. So I take more care than usual with cutting accuracy and seam allowance. I like 2.5 inch strips and I use the Stripology XL ruler unless I have the special fabric with cut lines printed. When sewing the strips together, I don’t try to cut the ends at a perfect angle and align them. I let the ends overhang a bit and use 2 pins so I can sew on the diagonal without drawing a line. Just go from corner to corner. If you have trouble remembering where to sew the line, look for the 2 little ends that you will cut off and envision a line that will cut them both off. I also take care when pressing the strip in half. If the raw edges go out of alignment, it's a big headache later.
I sew the binding onto the front of the quilt with a 2.8 stitch length and my standard foot. Walking feet have never helped me much. I align the right edge with the 1/4 inch line on the stitch plate and work slowly so that 1/4 allowance is exact. If the seam wanders, I rip it out and redo it. You really need that seam allowance to be even and consistent.
My standard foot has a "toe" that pokes out 1/4 inch so I use that to figure out when I'm 1/4 inch away from the corner. I don't know why the experts tell you to turn the quilt and stitch off the edge. I just backstitch a little. You already know how to flip the binding around to miter the corner, but make sure the folds are all 90 degrees.
Everyone has a different way of joining the strips. Here’s my favorite method. Once the strips are joined and attached, I press the binding away from the quilt. And then you have choices! If you want to stitch in the ditch from the front, which is my favorite look, the entire process hinges on getting the folded edge in exactly the right position on the back. The second seam will be on top of the first one since you're stitching in the ditch. So the folded edge has to overlap the seam by about 1/8 inch. If I'm using these magical special binding fabrics, the patterns function as a guide. You can see right away if you've pulled the folded edge too far or not enough. With regular fabric you have to glue and clip painstakingly while ensuring that the folded edge never goes too close to the seam line or too far over it. By the time you're stitching in the ditch, you have no control. If you clipped the strip properly, the seam on the back will be right where you want it.
Unless it is a really special quilt or I’m using the special fabric, I use the other method. Sew the binding to the front of the quilt and clip it a little farther past the seam line. Choose a bobbin thread that will not show too much against the front of your quilt (a border makes this easier) and any color you want for the top thread. Then sew the second seam from the back so you can see what you’re doing.
Getting perfect stitches next to a folded edge (in fact, topstitching in general) is less a matter of skill and more about the equipment. My preferred machine is a Juki TL so I use a left compensating foot (1.5 mm). This little bit of magic allows you to snug the left side of the foot right up against the fold and your stitches will march right along, 1.5 mm from the folded edge. If I have to use the other machine, I use the stitch-in-the-ditch foot, run the blade at the edge of the fold, and move the needle over to the right a few clicks so the seam goes where I want it. With this method, the seam will be visible on the front. Ask me why I care— I have no answer. If I had not been told about stitching in the ditch, I would be happily attaching binding from the back and I’d never give it a second thought. But when I need to finish a quilt quickly and the binding fabric doesn’t have the cleverly placed patterns, I do the second seam from the back.
I have one word of caution. Some quilters never press the binding strips in half. There’s a good reason for this. When you bring the binding over to the back, you are folding it twice in the same direction. That means the inside fabric, the part you’ll never see, is going to be infinitesimally narrower than the outside. I tend to use fine-thread fabric and thin cotton batting, so the difference does not cause problems. But if you use a high loft batting and thicker fabric, I can imagine that the binding would not want to lie flat. The pressed fold would not be in the right place. Something to think about.
I don't always use this stuff (printed with 4 patterns and 2.5 inch width) but when I do it gives such excellent results. I bound this baby quilt in no time at all. No glue. The printed pattern makes it easy to know that you have the binding pulled into the right position. I used my stitch-in-the-ditch foot and sewed the second seam in the ditch. The seam on the back side lands exactly where you want it.
Now I'm wondering if I could get the same result by marking binding strips with a chalk line 1/2 inch from the folded edge.
I thought it might help to outline the steps that got me reasonably confident in doing my own FMQ on a domestic machine. I tried and gave up a lot of times, but these are the individual steps that actually worked.
Small items like placemats and quilted tote bags (usually with fusible fleece so basting isn't an issue) allow you to work without having to support the weight of a quilt. I used a mylar template and drew lines with heat-erasable pen. This allowed me to get comfortable moving the fabric and coordinating the stitching speed. About those pens. I have never had lines reappear when the fabric gets cold, but I have found that Kona solids will sometimes lose the dye along with the ink. I had to remove stitches after a tension mishap and found that the entire pattern was visible because the dye had been removed, but when I re did the quilting stitches over the white lines you couldn't see them anyway.
Then I moved on to actual quilts, but I still drew patterns. I found that working on larger items was much easier if I used a pattern that allowed me to work in small sections at a time (an Irish quilter calls this the "puddle" method). I have a template that is basically a medallion, about the size of a dinner plate, so it starts and ends at the same spot. I traced it onto the quilt in a grid layout and then worked from the inside out. I only had to reposition the quilt after completing a medallion. Later I would go back and fill in the spaces with little details. The first picture shows this pattern repeated on a birdie quilt.
I got tired of tracing the template! That was motivation to learn how to do a simple stipple, which remains my most often used FMQ pattern. A YouTuber (sorry I didn't note which one) showed how to do it, and the key is incredibly simple. Do a couple of horizontal humps and then switch to vertical. Keep going like this. Draw on paper to get the hang of it. Once you have a few humps down, you will naturally just swoop around making waves that look random and fill the whole space. I can quilt a placemat in less than 5 minutes.
I wanted more! I tried feathers because I love them and found that with my trusty heat-erasable pens I could draw them onto a quilt, but it requires more sketching and erasing than I like. Angela Walters has a video for a pattern that she calls Paisley Feathers. It's magic! I have trouble visualizing the whole field and figuring out where to move next, and her instructions for making the little paisleys and then echoing to get to the next spot was the key. The second photo was my very first attempt at paisley feathers.
For larger quilts, I often use a dot-to-dot system. For an orange peel design, I can do the series of curves if I make a chalk mark at the halfway point on each square. I also used this when doing a prism pattern on the Postcard from Sweden quilt. I like the look of straight-line patterns but there is no way I will take the time to swivel the quilt to do them with a walking foot. I did the prisms by using FMQ so I could change direction. The third photo is the Postcard quilt with (sort of) straight lines done with FMQ.
FMQ now feels so natural that sometimes when sewing tricky seams, like curved edges of a sun hat, I use it instead of fussing with the regular presser foot.
When appliquéing a piece of woven cotton (backed with stabilizer) onto a t-shirt, should I use a regular sewing machine needle or a ball point?
I make a lot of small items out of scrap fabric and yesterday I dropped by a boutique and they bought hats, shoulder bags and zip pouches! Wholesale prices barely cover the materials, but we'll see where it goes. I never would have figured out the tricks to making things look "handmade instead of homemade" without all of you. And all of these patterns are free; I found them with suggestions from this sub.
I wrote a whole post about this and then must have used the wrong button to upload a photo and Reddit deleted all the text. Sorry about that. Here's what I meant to write:
I nearly gave up on quilting because making the sandwich was so hard.
I made a design wall by nailing foam core panels to a wall, and then I peeled off the protective film to expose the sticky side and covered them with flannel. I ran a strip of cork along the top for push pins. To make the sandwich, I smooth the backing onto the flannel, wrong side up. Then I generously spray the backing with Odiff 505 and pat the batting into place. Then I climb the ladder and use push pins to secure the batting. The pins are not necessary for this step but having them in position helps with the next one.
Spray the batting, climb the ladder and use the pins to secure the top. If you have a friend to hold the top away from the sprayed batting, that helps, but it's not vital. Climb down the ladder, pull the top away from the adhesive if you're working alone, and smooth down the top from the center out. Work in columns. Down the middle, then each side.
I can literally do this in ten minutes. And then I add safety pins so I can wrestle the quilt without worrying about layers shifting
The quilt you all admired in the previous post is Donna Jordan's free pattern called Diamonds Squared. It is a brilliant design, very easy to make but be warned-- a lot of the HSTs have edges on the bias and it is almost impossible to get the top to lie flat.
Recently I've resolved (yet again) to use up scraps. And it came to me all in a flash. These are 2 quilts that I made in the past. The one on the left was a project I did collaboratively with one of my best friends who wanted to make a quilt for her nephew's first big boy bed. I found lots of free block patterns online. I think the tulips, dragonflies, butterflies and chickens were all free. The others were bought at no great expense from a designer who sold through Etsy. The quilt on the right was a pattern called "Feathers" from the Pattern Basket.
For the birds, you only need 3 fabrics plus a little yellow or brown for the beak. It was really fun to look for prints that mimic feathers. So now I have decided that I will spend a little time each sewing day making a block from scraps even though I have no plan to make an actual quilt. I can just stash the blocks away and use them later.
I've been asked to teach a class of 8-12 year olds a one-day sewing workshop. No details have been worked out yet. I plan to ensure that there will be a machine for each kid and plenty of adult supervision, and that's as far as I've gotten.
Suggestions? Obviously I need to think up a simple project that can be completed in one session. This strikes me as very different from teaching adults to use a sewing machine. I'm not going to spend time on winding bobbins and adjusting tension, I've got to get the materials prepped so the kids can plunge right in and start making something. Am I right about that? Is a tote bag the right project? Pillowcase?
Help!
I was at my wit's end with tension on my machine with auto-tension and a drop-in bobbin. Knock on wood, but I think I have it figured out now. Here are the lessons I learned:
Here is the best thing I learned: you need a gauge to get correct bobbin tension. I got one of these and it made all the difference. You can get a fancy gauge made by Towa, but they don't work for the drop-in bobbin cases without a special insert. Every machine has a recommended tension setting (Juki is around 19-21). It turned out that my bobbin tension was too tight by a considerable margin. Adjusting the screw requires patience. Tiny increments, repeated testing. In theory, bobbin tension can be off a bit and you can fix it by adjusting the top tension, but with the auto-tension feature it all goes to hell.
Pay attention to the way the thread comes off the spool. The horizontal spindle will not work well most of the time. You're better off getting a thread stand and rod to put behind the machine. It matters because even a slight tug on the thread will cause the sensors to loosen. You need the thread to be completely loose when it enters the tension discs.
Clean the bobbin compartment obsessively. Remove the stitch plate, take out the bobbin case and use a vacuum cleaner. Get every speck of lint off the bobbin case and examine the area around the thread cutter for bits of thread.
Floss the tension discs when threading the machine. Once you have the thread seated in the discs, drop the presser foot to complete threading.
