Quilt tips – Piecing the top.
- When sewing bias seams, place a piece of light tissue paper over the seams, this will help not stretching but stabilizing the seams.
- Always sew the intersections with the seams in opposite direction with each other (nine patch piecing for example). The seams will “butt” against each other, forming a secure lock, thus creating perfect mating corners.
- Iron the seams towards the dark fabric so they are not visible from the top.
- For a perfect quarter-inch seam, tape s strip of mold skin ¼ inch to the right of the needle, this serves as a bridge for your fabric to ride against, the needle will run always a quarter inch away from that bridge, thus forming perfect quarter-inch seams.
- When drawing patterns on fabrics, extend the drawing line beyond the corner to ensure a sharp accurate point.
- If you are a serious quilter, invest in a high quality sewing machine such as Pfaff or Bernina. They do enhance the quality of your work. The Pfaff has built-in walking feet, which helps prevent stretching. You do not need to buy top of the line model, you can even buy pre-own machines, but a good brand is always help.
- Opening up seam-allowance is not necessary. It takes much more time to press and might weaken the seams. Just press the seams to the dark side.
- To speed-up your process, prepare all the pieces at one time and then sew the units as in assembly line production: sew all the similar units continuously. You do not need even to lift the pressure foot and cut the thread. Just feed them in one after the other then clip the thread to separate them afterward.
- If you do a lot of sewing, use in pre-wound bobbins, they do not cost much money but save a lot of time. They last very long too.
- To piece two triangles together by the bias edge, cut them in the square shapes instead, put them together as if you would do with the triangles, and then draw a diagonal line across the top square, sew on that line and then trim off the excess. This will help the bias line not stretched.
- When constructing a quilt top, try to keep the grain of all the pieces to be at the same direction. This will help the quilt top flatter, thus the whole quilt will laid or hung better over all.