…and in here. I think summer must get to everyone. Some of the blogs I read have gone quiet, or a bit slower anyway, and now it’s hit here too. It’s just too hot most days to be motivated to do much of anything! Adding in all the rest of the Life stuff means my productivity is taking a huge hit at the moment. I think I’ve composed quite a few posts in my head in the last week or so, none of which actually made it to a screen near you, and the rest of my quilting life is in no better shape!

I have been working on Inchies, slowly but surely, and I did make it to the Arts & Crafts store twice in two weeks, looking for fabric for the background quilt for the Inchies (it doesn’t hurt that the car is the only air conditioned place in my life right now). During one trip, there was a nice quilter in the shop who wanted to try hand quilting, and was looking for some hand quilting thread. The shop doesn’t even have any. How can you be a brick and mortar store that stocks quilting supplies without having even basic hand quilting thread of some kind in white and beige?

This quilter wasn’t getting much help from the sales person, who admitted she did everything by machine, so the quilter asked me what I thought about using any of the other threads they have in the store for hand quilting. I didn’t really have a clear answer for her on that one. I’ve never hand quilted with thread that wasn’t made for the purpose. I did remember that machine sewing thread is made with an opposite twist direction than hand sewing thread, since the machine will twist the thread further as it sews, which will increase the twist in a machine thread, but cause a hand sewing thread to untwist and eventually weaken and break.

I’m not sure if using a machine thread for hand work would do the same type of thing on some level, though I have used regular cotton machine sewing thread to appliqué or hand sew bindings down, and it twists and knots horribly, so maybe that can be attributed to the direction of the twist. I just can’t imagine trying to deal with knotting and twisting while you hand quilt though.

Anyway, I did what I could for this nice quilter in the shop, and gave her what other little helpful advice about hand quilting that I could on the fly since she’d never done it before. No, I don’t hand quilt anymore, but I did teach it for a while, so I at least have a few good tips. I can’t take credit however, for the very best tip about hand quilting ever. That one came from Kim DeCoste, Judy Murrah’s assistant with Quilts, Inc., when I worked at the Quilt Expo in Innsbruck, Austria in 1996. Yeah, I got to hobnob with the stars of the quilting world for a bit while I helped out in the Education Department, which Judy and Kim oversee.

Kim and I were standing around waiting to check participants in for a lecture, and chatting about quilting and our current projects. I was just starting the hand quilting on this project:

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I Love Quilting Sampler Quilt

It was the first project I’d ever hand quilted, and I was fumbling around a lot and my stitches were large, crooked and uneven. Kim’s advice about hand quilting was this:

Start with a really big needle, like a size 9. Learn the rocking motion and work on getting the stitches even. Once your stitches are straight and even and rocking your needle is easy for you, then switch to a size 10 needle. Your stitches will automatically become smaller with the smaller needle. Wash, rinse, repeat, switching to a smaller and smaller needle until your stitches are the size you want.

To be honest, at the time I was doubtful. It just sounded too easy. But I went home after the Expo and tried it out, and Kim was right on the money. I hand quilted this 36″ square sampler quilt, and by the time I quilted the cables in the border, my quilting stitches were straight, even, and nearly 12 stitches to the inch. I wouldn’t enter a quilt show in the hand quilting category, because it’s still not that great, but it’s definitely more than passable, and I’m sure Kim’s tip helped me get to the “pretty good” stage faster.

I shared this tip with the quilter in the shop, and told her it was too bad she lived in the opposite direction from the shop that I did, since I’d have been happy to share a spool of real hand quilting thread with her if she wanted to come by. I’m probably never going to use it for anything again!

Your Voice: what’s your best hand quilting tip?? Share it!

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Whenever I’ve shown Inchies or talked about them to quilter friends, almost the first question out of everyone’s mouth is “What do you do with them?” I mean, really, where’s everybody’s imagination? I’ve had a plan all along:

Sure, you can make them, trade them with other quilters if you’re so inclined, keep them stashed away in a box, or make jewelry out of them, but why not create larger quilt art pieces with them? These were the first Inchies I made, and they’re all from the same chunk of fabric. You can see closeups of the Inchies here.

The Inchies are made from two layers of fabric fused to either side of Timtex, and attached to this simple background quilt with Velcro Fabric Fusions. I wouldn’t use Timtex again, because while I like the stiffness and ease of construction use, it’s just too hard to hand sew beads and embellishments to the Inchies through the Timtex. I’ve discovered a better combination to use as a base from now on (more on that later).

The iron-on Velcro isn’t very user friendly either (or maybe I’m just challenged by fusible things). I’ve had a terrible time getting it to stick permanently like it’s supposed to; it seems to be stuck just fine until about an hour later when it’s completely cool, and then all the glue becomes goopy again and the pieces peel right off the fabric. Part of the problem is undoubtedly that I’m fusing it to two layers of fabric and batting or Timtex, but it’s completely strange that it seems stuck right after fusing, and then unsticks when it cools. I’ve started fusing it twice to see if that will help.

I wasn’t even sure I’d like the Velcro treatment since it might make the Inchies stick out too far from the quilt surface, but now that it’s done, I really love it! It gives the Inchies a “mounted” look and adds some dimensional interest. I was planning to tack the Inchies to the quilt with thread, but I did a couple that way and didn’t like doing it or the way it looked, so I switched to the Velcro. The Velcro has other advantages as well, since I can rearrange the Inchies on the quilt, or switch them out to display a different set.

When the quilt was ready for binding, I wasn’t too keen on adding anything visible around the edge. I remembered keeping an article about facing quilts during the great magazine purge, so I went digging. Thanks to a most excellent article by Katleen Loomis in American Quilter Ultimate Projects 2007 Magazine, I learned a new technique and the back of the quilt looks like this:

Her technique uses a one-piece curved corner facing and some dressmaking techniques to keep the facing from rolling to the front of the quilt. Where the corner and side facings meet a little pocket is formed, and if you don’t sew it closed, it makes the perfect place to put a piece of dowel rod for hanging a small quilt like this.

I think I was a little too vigorous when I pushed out the corners after turning the facing, so the corners of the quilt look a tiny bit dog-eared, but it isn’t as bad in person as it looks in the photos. That’s just something to remember for next time I use a facing to finish a quilt.

If I had the whole quilt to do again, I’d either leave more space around the outside of the Inchies, or shrink the space between the sets a bit. I had a moment when I wasn’t thinking ahead about binding and finishing at all, and forgot to leave a seam allowance for that when I trimmed the edges, so there’s a bit less space around the outside than I originally intended. There’s always next time. All in all though, I’m quite happy with the finished product!

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I did a small bit of machine quilting today, and I thought I’d share some quick tips to make machine guided grid quilting easier. I’m making a small background quilt to display Inchies, so all I needed was some straight line quilting to hold the layers together and create some visual interest.

On a small quilt sandwich with unpieced bali fabrics on both sides and Hobbs 80/20 Black batting in the middle, I used a ruler and a hera marker to mark the straight quilting lines on the sandwich. A hera marker is simply a piece of plastic with a nicely tapered, curved edge which, when pressed on the fabric, compresses the fibers and leaves a mark that is fairly easy to see. Note that this particular model by Clover is the one I’ve had the best luck with; the others that I’ve tried have been made of softer plastic and didn’t make as nice a mark.

I marked the lines on the quilt sandwich in one direction only, meaning all the lines that are parallel to each other in an up and down direction. If you mark all the grid lines in both directions before you start quilting, you may find that when you mark the second set of lines across the first, the first set of lines will have little waves or points where the second set crosses them, and it will be difficult to quilt straight lines later.

When I’m quilting a grid, whether it’s big or small, I always start with a line of quilting close to the center of the quilt or space, and then work outward to the right and left. I always begin quilting at the top of the piece or area, and quilt toward the bottom, which means rolling up the bulk of the quilt to fit under the machine head when working on the left side. Even with a walking foot or IDT/dual feed, the layers of a quilt sandwich will shift; it’s just a fact of life.

Starting each line of quilting at the top will prevent diagonal wrinkles from forming on the quilt top or back from stitching lines in both directions. Remember this “top-to-bottom” stitching technique the next time you’re putting down stitch in the ditch between rows and blocks on a large quilt, too, as the same idea applies and the same diagonal wrinkles can happen, just on a larger scale.

Once the first set of gridlines was quilted, I marked the second set perpendicular to the first. The second set of quilting lines needs a bit more attention to detail than the first. When you start adding quilting lines that cross other lines, you can run into trouble when the fabric starts shifting. As you come up to a previous line of quilting, you may find that the top fabric of the quilt sandwich starts to form a little hill, which will become a pleat if you keep sewing.

The solution is to slow down and pay special attention in this area. You can use your fingers on the top of the quilt to gently nudge the top fabric toward the presser foot, essentially forcing the top fabric to feed more quickly into the machine to reverse the negative pushing effect that the presser foot is having on the quilt sandwich. Not just for grids, this little nudging technique is infinitely useful whenever I do any kind of machine guided quilting with a walking foot or IDT/dual feed.

A few simple techniques made quick work of this little display quilt, so stay tuned for pics!

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