Beginner Quilting Session 4: Piecing

Now that we know how to cut our fabric, it's time to piece or sew our fabric together. Now, in quilting, all of the sewing is done with a quarter-inch seam allowance. Now there's a couple things that can help make keeping that quarter-inch seam allowance a little bit easier. One of those is what's called a quarter-inch foot. Now, if you have a different brand of machine than what I have, your quarter-inch foot might look a little bit differently, but what it is is a foot that has a little indentation right up here at the front.

And this is where I'm going to line my fabric up with, right along this inside edge of that foot right there. And that's going to give me an accurate quarter-inch seam allowance. Now, if your machine didn't come with one, you can buy them after, as long as you get the one that matches the brand of your machine or you can use just your standard presser foot. Here I have just my standard presser foot. And what I can do is I need to figure out where my quarter-inch seam allowance would be using this foot.

And to do that, I would adjust the needle position on my machine. I could go either direction. Either I could go all the way to the left, meaning my needles on this side, and then figure out how far to the left I need to be in order to make that quarter inch line up with the edge of my presser foot. I could go the opposite direction, move my needle position to the right, and then find one of the lines on my throat plate. That gives me that quarter-inch seam allowance.

So on your throat plate, you do have some lines where they can be kind of hard to see, especially once you get your fabric under there, the light from your machine is shining on there and it can just be a little bit difficult. So you can get little things that you can place on your machine to help mark where that quarter-inch might be. So say I've moved my needle over to the right and then I know right here is going to be my quarter-inch seam allowance. So this is just a little sticky strip. It works a lot like a window cling.

So there is actually no adhesive, so it's not going to be leaving behind any residue on my machine, but I can easily take it off when I'm not quilting or move it if I need to. And that's just a really easy thing to have there. And it also gives me a lot longer sort of runway, if you will, of where I can align my fabric up with, getting all the way up to where my needle's at. If you don't have one of these or can't find something like this, something simple like painter's tape, or masking tape, you can use that as well. Something that you can easily remove from your machine without leaving behind any sticky residue.

So for the piecing today, I'm gonna go ahead and use my quarter-inch foot. So I'm just gonna take this, put it right there on my machine. Now because I have, on my machine and most machines, you have the option to do a lot of different stitches on your machine. So you might have to adjust your needle position, even if you're using your quarter-inch foot. Now, if I were to start sewing right now, my needle will come down directly onto the metal part of my presser foot because my presser foot is in the way.

See it's hitting that foot. So what I need to do is just set it up for a straight stitch down the center. So now you can see if I move my needle, it's going to go right down the center of that foot which is where I want it to go. My quarter-inch presser foot actually has a little indentation where I've hit it numerous times with that needle, so whatever you need to do to remind yourself to always just check and make sure that your needle is fitting through whatever opening you have in your presser foot. So now we have our fabric.

Here I just have some squares we're gonna use as examples to stitch together and like most sewing you're sewing with right sides together. So I have fabric here that doesn't really have a definite right or wrong side. One side might be a little bit lighter than the other. But so I'm just going to pick these two sides to be my right sides. I'll then line my fabric up, right sides together.

Now it's really easy to do that if you have two identical shapes like that, because I can make sure that all edges are lined up. If you don't have identical shapes, you just wanna make sure that whatever side it is you're stitching down, that that's the one that's perfectly lined up. A lotta times when you're using high-quality cotton like this, it actually tends to stick together a little bit by itself. But if you are just starting out to quilting or just new to sewing in general, I would definitely recommend putting a few pins in place to hold your layers together. And just be one less thing you have to worry about while stitching.

So I'm just going to put a couple pins in and I'm putting my pins far enough back that I won't have to worry about removing them when I get close to stitching. So now that I have my fabric right sides together, everything's lined up. I'm ready to take it to my machine and stitch. So I'm lining my fabric up with the edge of that quarter-inch presser foot. I'm going to lower my foot and then just start stitching.

Now I don't have to worry about doing any sort of back stitching at the beginning and I also don't have to do any back stitching when I get to the end. I can just simply take it off my machine and cut the thread. Now, the reason I don't have to worry about doing any back stitching at the beginning or end is that a lotta times when you're piecing together, either squares like this or whatever pieces you're building upon, the edges of these are then going to get caught in whatever I'm adding onto and adding onto. So these edges will both get stitched over. Also, once I am entirely done with my quilt and I am ready to quilt it, everything is gonna get stitched over yet again.

So everything is going to be held together nice and neat. So you have nice straight seam right there and my two pieces are held together. Now this was, you know, I just had two squares and I'm gonna sew 'em together. But this obviously isn't my finished quilt. I'm probably gonna have a lot of squares that I'm going to need to put together so I can do what's called chain piecing.

And this is where I have a bunch of pairs, already laid a right sides together. And I'm going to stitch them all, one right after the other without stopping to clip my threads or even have to lift my presser foot or anything in between. Now these are much smaller squares. So I'm not going to worry about putting a pin in place. I'm just going to hold them and move them over to my machine.

So again, I'm lining up my fabric, and I'm gonna go ahead and right along the side. So now I'm to the end of that pair of pieces of fabric. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna grab my next pair, not gonna do anything that this one here, I'm going to slightly lift up my presser foot just to hold this new set of squares in place and I'm gonna continue stitching. So again, this is called chain piecing and I'm essentially creating a long chain of pieced squares of fabric. Again, I'll just lift my presser foot up a little bit and go right into stitching my next one.

I'm gonna do one more. Again, make sure our fabric is lined up right sides together. Lift your presser foot just slightly. And it actually helps if you stop maybe right at the last stitch in this last fabric there, your needle's down in that fabric. That way nothing does move on you or get in the way, but in general, you could just keep stitching right along.

Now I have a chain of four sets of squares. I could have 40 sets of squares. It doesn't matter really how long your chain is. You can just keep going. When you're done, we can take it off and cut our thread.

And you can see, get these outta the way, that we have just to chain of our pieced little squares. Then take my scissors and just cut all my little squares apart. So if you think about it, I'm actually saving some thread. Now it might not seem like that much thread with just these four little pairs here but when you sew, you know, like on this one, I have this much thread to start with. And then I pulled thread out at the end.

And then I pulled more thread out to start my next square. So that's a couple inches each square, multiplied over a bunch of squares and I'm actually saving a good amount of thread. So you could just keep going, piecing as many of these pairs together as you want in one long chain. Cut 'em apart at the end and then you're ready to go. So again, that's how you can piece and how you can do your quarter-inch seam allowance and then how you can do chain piecing.

Now I have a couple other squares out here on my board and I wanna show you just a fun, quick, little way to test and make sure you're doing an accurate seam allowance. This not only tests and makes sure that it's accurate, but that you're doing it accurate consistently. So what I have is two-and-a-half-inch squares and I went ahead and cut them in contrasting colors so it was really easy to see where my seam is when I stitch it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to layer my pieces together. Again, I could put a pin in place to hold it, if I wanted to, or I could just simply take it over to my machine and stitch.

So I'm just going to take it over and stitch, again, using my quarter-inch seam allowance. Right along the edge. Just make sure we're lined up. And then stitch. Okay, so I've got two of them together now.

Lemme go ahead and take this off. What I wanna do now is add a third square so I can go on either side. I just wanna use the contrasting color. So I could go orange over here, pink over here, but I'm gonna grab this pink one and line it up with the other side of my square. And I'm going to stitch this one.

Again, making sure everything is lined up and then I will go ahead and stitch. Okay. And you can see, I just caught my thread from behind. I can simply pull that back and it will come out when I am done sewing. So didn't have to worry about it buckling up on me like that.

Okay, so now I have my three squares stitched together. Now these were two-and-a-half-inch squares when I cut them. So on both sides, I should be using a quarter-inch seam allowance. So taking a quarter inch off each side. This center square should measure exactly two inches.

So I grab my ruler, again, these nice, handy rulers as you can see right through. And I would look and see that my center square is exactly two inches. That means I not only got my quarter-inch seam allowance right one time, but I got it the second time as well. Now I could continue on with this test if I really wanted to make sure that everything was accurate and I could either make more strips this way or I can make another strip of three, attach those two together and measure this way as well. So you can really measure any way you want just to make sure that you have that accurate seam allowance right at a quarter inch.

So now that I know that that is accurate and I know my piecing is going to be solid here on out. We're gonna get our iron and everything ready and we're going to move on to how you would actually press your pieces once you've stitched them.