Edge & Finishes Session 6: Final Overview

Hopefully you have enjoyed watching some of these techniques being done, and you've chosen some, if not all of them, to try on some of your next quilted pieces. One of the things that you can do though, if you don't want to put them on a quilt before you have some experience with them is you can go down to your fabric store and buy pre-quilted fabric, cut it into squares, say 12 inches, and make yourself a little practice book and use all of these techniques on the edges of those quilted blocks, and then you have a little reference library, if you will, to go and look at when you are trying to decide how I'm gonna finish this next quilt. I also hope that you've seen how you can really personalize a piece by changing up how you finish it, especially if you're using somebody else's patterns, and you're using somebody else's designs of fabric, and you wanna put your own personal stamp on it. You can really kind of funkify the edge and make it more interesting, and make it more your own. So remember that you can use lots of different things that you already have on hand. You don't have to go out and buy fancy ribbon, you don't have to go out and by rat tail. You can use your own fabrics twisted, it's one of the funnest things to do, and you can just rip those fabrics and twist them up nice and tightly and couch them on by machine, you can couch them on by hand, you can couch them on and add beads as you're doing it. You can use some of the things that I've taught you in this class as beginning points and add other things to them. You can mix some of the techniques together, you could use a couching technique with hand couching and beads added to them, instead of doing it by machine, there's so many things you can do. Also remember that the fray is a fabulous design element. This quilt uses that fray very, very much. We've got the quilt blocks themselves that went down on top of this other piece of silk that had this wonderful frayed edge to them, and then I continue that fray feeling by fraying the silk that I used to put the binding on with, and then I brought that color from the frayed edge here back out here by putting on this really fine couched fiber. The edges of our quilts can be quite important, and we tend to just think, "Oh, I'm just gonna "put a binding on 'em," but we can really change everything and add some absolutely fabulous visual interest by dolling up those edges of our quilts with fabulous finishes.