With the Fat Quarter Quilt finished, it’s time to begin a new quilting project.

I’ve sorted out my Layer Cake fabric for the Stack’n’Whack quilt.  You’ll see a picture of the fabric in this week’s news along with:

• New Project – Stack ‘n’ Whack Quilt using Layer Cake Fabric
• Featured Product of the Month – Creative Binding Techniques DVD
• Tips for Using Flannel in Your Quilts
• Penny’s Postcard Posse Christmas Roundup – Deadline November 18!
• Featured Block in Video – Airplane Quilt Block
• November Quilt Block Patterns

http://how-to-quilt.com/newsletter/airplanequiltblock.php

The video block of the week is an airplane quilt block that actually looks like an airplane.  It’s easy to sew together and will make a fun block for just about anyone. Because it has a large rectangle piece for the wings, you can even use it as a Friendship block.

Happy Quilting!

Penny Halgren

www.How-to-Quilt.com

www.TheQuiltingCoach.com

New quilters often get frustrated when trying to select a quilting technique.

Let’s face it, quilt block patterns are very specific.  You know exactly how many squares to cut, how many triangles to stitch together and the exact size of everything.  However, once the top is pieced many new quilters feel left out in the dark as far as how to quilt their project.

That’s because the actual quilting of your project is based on personal preference.  And, many books and patterns offer no help.  Have you ever noticed that they say “Quilt as desired.”  How much help is that?

Time and Tide Quilt

Many beginners quilt their first quilt using a “stitch in the ditch” or “outline” method. This style is simple in that you just sew your quilting stitches in, or next to, the seams of your pieced blocks.

If you have made an appliqué quilt, your stitches can outline the appliqué pieces on your quilt.  While this is an easy method for hand quilting, it is much more difficult when you are machine quilting.

There are other styles of machine quilting that are easier and will make your finished quilt look beautiful.

Because sewing straight lines, especially across the seams of your quilt blocks, can be difficult for beginning machine quilters, free motion or continuous line quilting may be a more satisfying technique as you perfect your machine quilting.

If you are using your home sewing machine, simply drop the feed dogs on your machine, replace your regular presser foot with a darning foot, and stitch somewhat random designs on your quilt.  These can be squiggly designs that look like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Or you can create more identifiable designs like leaves, ocean waves or flowers.

With a little practice and a few special techniques, your machine quilting will enhance your finished quilt.  And you will finish your quilts in a shorter time frame – allowing you to make more quilts for your family and friends to enjoy!

To discover a few other finishing techniques, visit:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/2310-quilting-techniques.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

Woven Heart Quilt Block

Selecting fabrics for your quilts can be a difficult task if you are not comfortable choosing color schemes.

While some people do have a natural instinct for selecting perfect colors, others don’t.  The good news is that color-choosing skills can be developed with a little knowledge and practice… and a color wheel.

To make it really simple, start with a quilt using a monochromatic color scheme.  Choose a color you like, and then combine fabrics that are light, medium and dark.  For example, if your color scheme is red, you can select fabrics that range from pink to a dark red to include in your quilt.

Once you have your fabrics chosen, pay attention to the value as you decide where to place the fabrics in your quilt.  If you are making an Ohio Star quilt block, you could place the light pink in the center square and the dark red as the points in the star surrounding the center.  Fill in the remaining pieces in the block in medium pink.

Another type of color selection for a quilt is a polychromatic color scheme. This quilt uses many different colors.  Most crazy quilts and many scrap quilts are polychromatic, although either of these types of quilts can easily have a more limited color selection.

If you are making a quilt that has a complementary color scheme or an analogous color scheme, it could be helpful to have a color wheel.  Complementary colors are those that are across the color wheel from each other, while analogous colors sit next to each other on the wheel.

Friendship Quilt Block

Sometimes even using a color wheel can be frustrating.  It wasn’t until I took a class in fabric dying that I understood why not all greens looked good together; or why some purples seemed to clash with each other.

It turns out that because green is a combination of yellow and blue, how much of each is used to make the green will affect the actual color of green.  If there is more yellow, you will get a yellow-green; and those don’t mix too well with the blue-greens.

This is one place where a color wheel can help a lot.  By placing the wheel next to your fabric, you can see whether the fabric is tending to the yellow or to the blue.  By sticking with one or the other, you will probably be happier with your final quilt.

If you are completely stuck with colors, a quick trip to a paint store to get a collection of paint chips may help.  Often paint stores have color chips with multiple, coordinating colors.  Taking one or more of these along on your fabric shopping trip may make the selection of your fabric much easier.

Color value, as well as the size of the print in your fabric, may make a difference in how your fabrics go together for your quilt.

For additional tips and techniques for choosing fabric for your quilts, visit:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/1508-choose-fabric-colors.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

Utah Star Quilt Block

Appliqué quilts have always been popular and are gaining increased popularity these days with the addition of embellishments.

If you want to try adding embellishments to your appliqué quilts, but don’t know where to begin, here are a few tips:

• Keep in mind who the quilt is for – if it is for a baby, stay away from small buttons and rhinestones.
• “A little goes a long way” – if you’ve created a flower garden and are adding buttons, adding buttons in just a few of the flowers (instead of every flower in the garden) will make the quilt more interesting and not overpowering.
• If the quilt or garment will be washed frequently, keep the laundering requirements in mind – some items may fall off during washing/drying, or the items may make it difficult to launder the item at all.

There is no science to embellishing quilts or garments and it is easy to experiment with your embellishments before you apply them to your project.

The first step is to decide what types of embellishments you may use on your piece, then place them where you think you want them.  Keep adding, taking off, and moving them around until you are happy with the look and then attach them to the quilt or garment.

Embellishments can be as simple as rick rack, embroidery stitching, buttons and rhinestones.

Buttons can be especially interesting when you use “theme” buttons.  For example, the buttons in the center of your flower could be round, but why not include some buttons that have petal shapes – or even sew a bee-shaped button onto your quilt?

Remember to have fun with the embellishments on your appliqué quilts:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/1164-applique-quilts.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

So – now the quilt top is finished, and it’s time to find fabric for the back.

Many quilters wait until their top is finished to even begin to think about what to use for the back – including me!  And, often, by the time we get to the backing there isn’t enough fabric left over.  What to do?

Actually, you have several options:

• choose a completely different fabric – one that isn’t in your quilt top
• make quilt blocks for the backing – using either left over fabric from the quilt top or new fabric
• sew strips together to make a piece large enough for the back of your quilt

Bubba's Ocean Waves Quilt

In my early quilting days, I thought the backing needed to be all one piece of fabric – or at least pieces of the same fabric sewn together.  Then I made a quilt for engineering son Bubba, using some special Pima cotton I found at a random fabric shop.

By the time the quilt top was finished, the shop didn’t have any more Pima cotton.  Yup, this was a really random fabric shop.  The owner just got bolts of fabric that were left over from the manufacturers, so the prices were excellent.

But it was like shopping at the 99-cent store – you could never count on anything being there the next time around.

Now what?

I didn’t want to mix my beautiful Pima cotton with regular calicoes (yes, it was that long ago!).

I had some fairly wide strips of fabric left in some of the colors.  So, I simply sewed them together, looking like rectangles, until the piece was large enough for the backing.

It ended up looking pretty good, and the seams weren’t too difficult to manage as I was quilting the quilt.  The biggest problem in the quilting was that the thread count was so high (just like a batik), it was almost impossible to quilt through.

You’ll see pictures of the front and back of the quilt as well as links to other articles about unique backings for your quilts:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/2402-backing-quilts.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

Woven Heart Block

Once your quilt top is finished and ready to be quilted, the next step is getting the backing and batting.

Sometimes when I am at that stage in my quilt making, I just wander off to the quilt shop and buy enough fabric for the backing.  It always amazes me how much fabric it takes for the backing.

Just the other day, I wanted backing fabric for a relatively small quilt – just about 53 inches square.  In order to get enough to cover the entire back, I had to get 4 yards, and at $7.50 per yard, that’s $30 plus tax, just for the back of the quilt.

But what are your choices if you want to finish the quilt?

Of course, I could just fold it up and lay it on my shelf for another day.  But I really wanted to finish the quilt so I could use it.

Quilting Daughter Stephanie's Quilt

When quilting daughter Stephanie had that dilemma, she pieced the backing.  She made a block for the center of the quilt, and then added large squares and rectangles to create a back that was almost as interesting as the front of the quilt.

There are other options, as well.

Years ago, I made a Pima cotton quilt for engineering son Bubba.  When the top was finished, I didn’t have enough of any one fabric for the back, but I did have enough to sew large pieces together to make the back.

If you are looking for a simple, yet somewhat interesting, way to create backing fabric, visit:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/2402-backing-quilts.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

How frustrating is it when you can’t find the tool that will make your machine quilting easier and more beautiful?

A while back we heard from expert machine quilter, Pam Bauer, that one way to make your machine quilting easier is to get an extension table for your sewing machine.  The type of extension table Pam was talking about is a little table that is the same height as your sewing machine and fits around the machine making your sewing platform much larger.

When I saw a picture of an extension table, it made all kinds of sense why this would help.  What it does is make your sewing surface larger so more of your quilt is flat.  That means that the sides of the quilt aren’t being pulled away from the sewing machine needle, making it more difficult to feed the quilt through the machine.

My homemade extension table

An extension table is quite a handy gizmo when you are machine quilting – if you can find one for your machine.  It turns out they don’t make them for all machines, and it seems there are no generic extension tables that work for many different models.

At first I was surprised to hear this but then, when I thought about it, I realized that the extension table needs to have the right size opening in order to fit around the sewing machine without any spaces for the quilt to get caught.  Even with that understanding, it didn’t solve the problem that nobody made an extension table for my sewing machine.

What to do?  You are probably as resourceful as I, so this is probably a familiar story.

I hunted around my house for something that might work, and came upon a cardboard box.  A box cutter and some tape solved the problem.

Although it isn’t the most beautiful piece of equipment in the world, it works.  And I recently added some shelf paper to make the surface smooth so the quilt would glide over it:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/2312-extension-for-machine-quilting.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

Mrs. Bryant's Choice Quilt Block

Whew!  Made it through Halloween and the time change – all in the same weekend.

Last week was also a productive quilting week – the Fat Quarter Quilt is all finished and is working its way through the washer and dryer.  I’m anxious to see how it softens up – and how the basting spray washes out of it.

The binding presented a little challenge in that it was the first time I had used a Stuffed Binding technique.  I wanted the binding to be at least ½-inch on the front to make it easier to accommodate the extra batting, and I wanted to be able to finish it on the machine.  After a couple of false starts, I was able to accomplish all of that.

This is the first quilt where everything has been done on the machine – piecing, quilting, and all of the binding.  Usually I hand stitch my binding on.  However, since many of you want to be able to do the binding entirely on the machine, I decided to use this as a trial project.  You’ll be hearing more about how to do this in the upcoming weeks.

If you haven’t heard about our newest Binding Mentor, you’ll find information in this week’s news.  This video product will show you seven more ways to bind your quilts.  You’ll learn how to bind quilts with curves, inside and outside points, Prairie Points, French Fold, and many more.

And, we have one last quilt block video for Halloween – The Bat Block:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/newsletter/thebatblock.php

In this week’s How-to-Quilt.com news, you’ll find:

• Fat Quarter Quilt Update – Finished!
• Featured Product of the Month – Creative Binding Techniques DVD
• BOOK OF THE MONTH – I Love Patchwork: 25 Irresistible Zakka Projects to Sew
• Penny’s Postcard Posse Christmas Roundup Next – Deadline November 18!
• Featured Block in Video – The Bat Quilt Block
• November Quilt Block Patterns

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/newsletter/thebatblock.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

Lattice Star Quilt Block

If you’ve ever tried to machine quilt a large quilt on your home sewing machine, you are familiar with the problem of how to maneuver the quilt under the needle.

Or maybe you are avoiding machine quilting altogether because you can’t imagine how to work with the bulk of the quilt in that tiny space in your machine.

Fear not, there are a couple of different solutions for the problem:

1. Roll the quilt from the outside toward the center of the quilt.  You might want to machine baste around the outside of the quilt to prevent shifting, but once that is done, you can easily roll the quilt up until you have a flat space where you want to quilt.
2. “Nest” the quilt.  To do that, simply flatten the area you wish to quilt, and then “bunch up” the quilt around the flat space.

In addition to making sure that the area where you are quilting is flat, you’ll want to support the edges of the quilt that are not being quilted.

Pinwheel Quilt Block

The part of the quilt that is on your sewing machine is relatively well supported, but as you quilt you will find that most of the quilt is on your table in front, in back or on the side of your machine.

If these parts of the quilt are left to hang, it will be more difficult to move your quilt through your sewing machine and get the nice even stitches you want.

For ideas for how to support the parts of your quilt not being quilted, visit:

http://www.how-to-quilt.com/articles/2311-machine-quilting-space.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny

Mosaic Quilt Block

Do you ever feel like you are being taken for granted?  You work hard all day and night, and wish someone would thank you, pat you on the head, or give you a break?

As crazy as it sounds, your sewing machine needle will work better if it gets a break, too.

The break I’m talking about is a permanent one, though.  And not one where the needle actually splits into pieces, but where you remove it and replace your sewing machine needle with a brand new one.

If you are anything like me, you take your sewing machine needles for granted – kind of like families sometimes take us and the work we do for granted.

Double Link Quilt Block

Not that we intend to neglect or overuse our sewing machine needles or anything.  But, it’s easy to forget how long the needle has been tirelessly making thousands of stitches in our fabric.

Most needle makers and thread manufacturers agree that sewing machine needles should be changed every 6-10 hours of sewing.  Not only will your sewing be improved by a nice sharp needle, but using the right needle for the fabric you are sewing will make a big difference, too.

The needle you use for machine quilting should be different from the one you use for your piecing.  And, if you are sewing knit fabrics, you’ll want to use a ball point needle for more efficiency.

For additional tips about those boring but important sewing machine needles, visit:

http://how-to-quilt.com/articles/6023-needles.php

Happy Quilting!

Penny