Clever little ideas for quilting faster and more easily.
Don’t you just hate it when you sew something wrong and have to get out your dreaded seam ripper, so you can cut those stitches apart and then sew your pieces together again? Ripping out stitches is a slow, messy, irritating job that I think I can safely say is on everyone’s least-favorite list when…
Wondering how you can use that layer cake precut package you just bought? There are lots of different ways to cut it up for use in quilts and sewing projects. 1. Four 5″ squares The finished size of the squares will be 4-1/2″ when sewed into a quilt. 2. Eight 2-1/2″ squares The finished size…
If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to baste a quilt, fusible batting is definitely worth a look. It’s probably the simplest of all the five quilt basting methods I’m aware of. No safety pins, no spraying, no tedious stitching — all you need is an iron and your quilt layers. How Fusible…
Basting with a quilter’s tack gun involves loading a rack of plastic tacks into the gun, poking the needle on the gun’s nose through the fabric layers, and pulling the trigger to shoot the tack through the quilt sandwich. The two brands I’ve come across are the Dritz Quilter’s Basting Gun, which I have tried,…
We just found this helpful video on preparing and spray basting your quilt layers. Love the colors in this quilt, too! Spray basting is our all-time favorite way to get a quilt ready for the final finishing steps. If you haven’t tried it, watch to get a good sense of just how easy it is.
Do your hands or fingers get tired or achy when you cut your fabric? We just came across this cool-looking cutter that rests in the palm of your hand and reduces the finger strain caused by gripping a regular rotary cutter. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but you can see how it works in this…
Everyone who has had to wrestle with a heavy, bulky quilt sandwich knows that drag — the weight of the quilt pulling against the needle — is one of a machine quilter’s greatest enemies. How cool is this trick for creating a smooth, slippery surface for machine quilting? I’ve used silicone sheets to reduce the…
One of the most vexing storage problems in my sewing room has always been, “What to do with all my wall quilts when I don’t have them up on the walls?” After years of piling out-of-season quilts awkwardly in a corner, I finally found a storage solution I love: a thing called a roll file,…
Trying to cut fabric strips and squares so they turn out straight and square — and failing a good part of the time — is a huge frustration for many new quilters. (More experienced ones, too!) If you have trouble keeping your ruler from sliding out of alignment while you cut, or your rotary cutter…
One of the great frustrations you may run into when you bind your quilts is achieving a perfect mitered corner — that is, a corner with a beautiful, crisp 45-degree angle that ends in a sharp point. This video shows the clever (and easy) binding trick quilt designer Patrick Lose uses to achieve those perfect…
One of the worst moments you can experience as a quilter is putting a quilt into the wash for the first time, then taking it out and seeing to your horror that one or more of the fabrics in the quilt has bled dye onto other parts of the quilt. I’ve had that happen, and…
If you use basting spray or fusible web when you quilt, chances are you have made the mistake I made yesterday — you’ve accidentally ironed some glue and created a sticky mess on the sole plate of your iron. Once that happens, the glue sticks to everything you try to iron. Instead of gliding over…