Quilting Tutorials

There are certain steps of the quilting process where I tend to stall out because I don't remember exactly how I did it last time.  Then I waste a lot of time looking through my quilting books, which offer conflicting advice and methods, and hunting aimlessly through my hastily-scribbled notes and old blog posts, trying to remember what worked or didn't work for me or what I vowed to do differently the next time around.

This page is intended as a personal bookmark to the methods that are currently giving me the best results, to prevent me from having to figure it out all over again with every single quilt.  Obviously there is more than one "right" way to finish a quilt and you should do whatever works best for you.  

Joining Batting Scraps With Your Sewing Machine

Sewing Y-Seam Patchwork on my Vintage Singer Featherweight

Invisible Machine Appliqué Settings on my Bernina 750QE

Left Block Hand Stitched, Right Block Invisible Machine Appliqué 

How I Fixed That Bleeding Dye

Soaking Bloody Blocks in Sudsy Dawn Until the Water Ran Clear

Sizing and Preparing Quilt Backings

Quilt Backings

My Favorite Longarm Quilting Tutorials (Basics like Loading, Threading, Tension etc.)

Getting Ready for Longarm Quilting

Quilting With Invisible Monofilament Nylon, Longarm and Domestic Bernina Machines

Monofilament Stitch In the Ditch on my APQS Longarm Machine

Quilt Bindings: As of 3/26/2019, I'm cutting my binding strips 2 1/8" wide for wool or double batting, but only 2" wide (or even 1 7/8" wide) for cotton or 80/20 batting.  I don't like how it looks when the binding is wider on the back of the quilt than it is on the front.  Perimeter of Quilt Top + 12" divided by 42" to get the number of crosswise binding strips needed, rounding up to the next whole number

Quilt Binding Sewn to Front of Quilt by Machine, Then Hand Stitched to Backing Side

HOWEVER...  Hand stitching binding takes FOREVER!  Like 6-8 hours or longer depending on the size of the quilt, stretched over several days...  And not every quilt is worth the labor of love that is hand stitched binding.  This is my current favorite method for machine stitched bindings:

Invisible Machine Stitched Binding