Trapunto Quilting: Session 2 - Traditional Trapunto

The first method of Trapunto quilting I'm gonna show you is traditional Trapunto quilting. So this is what I call how they did it sort of back in the day before you had extra layers of batting you could use, before you really even had a machine. I'll show you how to do it entirely by hand. But this is where we're actually going to baste some muslin or just another piece of fabric behind our top layer and use some stuffing to add extra texture and dimension. So you've already seen our sample here. I've just done some simple shapes, and that's what I'm gonna show you first is just how to sort of start and get right into the traditional Trapunto method. So I have just a little squares of fabric here. I have my top layer of fabric, and then I have a back layer of fabric. This can just be muslin. If you have some small scraps of a fabric that maybe you weren't gonna use for anything else, you can use it for this technique. I would recommend that it is a lighter fabric than your top layer just so nothing shows through. So if this was the reverse, you can definitely tell that there's a darker fabric underneath this white here. So again, if you're not using muslin, just make sure you're using a fabric that is lighter than your top layer. The first thing we wanna do is baste our layers in place. Now I know this is a really small piece, so you may not necessarily have to baste. But it's good to just sort of know the order that you would be doing this technique no matter what size of fabric you're using. So the first thing I'm gonna do is take this to my machine and baste right around the edges. I just have my regular presser foot on because that's all I need to do a basting stitch. Basting is a much longer stitch length than what you would normally sew. So when I'm doing basting, I just take my stitch length up as long as it'll possibly go which is 5.0 on my machine. So a normal stitch length is 2.5, and I have elongated that all the way up to five. All I'm going to do is stitch all the way around the perimeter of my rectangles of fabric here. I'm not really worried about whether I'm using a quarter inch seam allowance, a three. It doesn't really matter. I just wanna hold these pieces of fabric together. And this stitching, I will remove it once I'm done. So I did not backstitch at the beginning. I do not wanna backstitch at the end. And because we're going all the way around the perimeter of a shape, I do not want to accidentally stitch over where I started because I wanna be able to take these stitches out. So I'm going to stop a stitch short, raise my needle up. When I pull it out, I wanna make sure I leave a long thread tail so I have something to grip onto when I want to actually remove my basting stitches. So again, no matter what size of of fabric you're starting with whether this is a whole cloth quilt you're working on or these are just small blocks you're doing, you want to baste your piece of muslin in place. Next, you would decide what shape or quilting design you want to have stuffed for the Trapunto effect. I'm going to demonstrate just the little rectangle or square down here. You can see you can do any sort of shape you want or even do a more complicated quilting design which we'll show in a minute. So I'm gonna take this back over to my machine, and I'm just going to freehand stitch a little square. Now we've just done a basting stitch. So I wanna make sure and change my stitch length back to my normal construction stitch length because I want this to stay in place. Get my thread out of the way. And now I can just stitch my shape. I say a basic geometric shape like a square, a circle. Even if you wanna go a little more complicated like a heart, something like that is really good to start off with and practice because you get the feel for what Trapunto is. But it's not a complicated shape that you have to worry about trying to cut apart or stuff. Now I do you want this one to stay in place, so I am going to overlap my stitching to lock this in place rather than do a back stitch. All I've done is stitched three or four stitches over where I started with my end. That'll hold it in place. Take this off my machine. And now I need to trim some threads. I'm stitching in white thread on this green fabric so you can actually see the shape that I'm stitching, but this stitching is going to stay there. This shape or your quilting design, whatever it is you're stitching is not going to be removed. So if you don't wanna see that thread, pick a thread that blends into or matches your fabric. We're now going to move to the wrong side here. And what I need to do is trim a little slit in the back of the muslin only. I do not want to accidentally cut this top layer of fabric or I'm gonna have to start all over. So what I'm gonna do is use my fingers to pull apart our two pieces of fabric. So you can mostly do this by feel. But you can see I'm holding just the white fabric with this hand and I've got the green fabric with this hand, so I've pulled them apart. I know that I'm only holding my back layer here. And I can do just a little slit in the fabric. And then now if I wanna make that slit a little larger, I can just put my scissors in and cut. And I know I'm cutting just the back of my layer of muslin, not through the top layer. Now the size of slit that you do depends on how easy you wanna make this process. And by that I mean the slit that you cut is so you can stuff your batting into your shape. This a fairly large slit. It's gonna be pretty easy to stuff our batting in place. That does mean though however when I'm done, I'm going to need to do a couple whips stitches to hold that back in place so my batting doesn't fall out. But once I have my slit cut in the back, we're going to start by taking little pieces of batting. And I like to sort of ball it up a little bit, making it easier to hold on to. I'm gonna grip it with my tweezers here, and we're just going to start inserting it into our shape. So you can see how easy that was to do with the tweezers. Again, this is a larger shape to start with. So you may be fine using your fingers if you'd like to try that method. But again, I like to sort of roll my batting to make it just easier to grip and stuff it into our shape. And you may have to stuff a little bit at a time. And it's really up to you as to how much stuffing you wanna add. What you do wanna make sure is that you're doing it uniformly. So what I mean by that is I've added two little clumps of stuffing, and maybe that's all I wanna add to it. But if you look at it from the front side, more of the stuffing is down here at the bottom and there's not a lot of it up here in this corner. So if this is all the stuffing that I wanted to add, I would still wanna make sure that I use my fingers or my tweezers and evenly distribute that stuffing to all corners, all sections of my shape. And I can sort of go by feel to see if I have stuffing going all the way to the outer edges. And when I know I do, then I can take my hand sewing needle right here. And I'm just going to put a couple little stitches to hold my big sort of slit together. It does not matter at all what this looks like on the back. You're never going to see it. And you just wanna make sure that while you're actually putting the rest of your quilt together whether this is your entire quilt, you're making a small art quilt, or these are just blocks that are then going to be stitched together, you don't want any of that batting to come out. So I am just going to tie a couple knots. To do a knot, I simply go through my fabric. I have my loop of thread here. I'm gonna stick my needle through it, pull tight, and just a couple knots like that is more than enough to hold it in place. And just like that, we have our top layer of fabric ready to go. By that, I mean this is now ready to be used in a quilt or on a quilt block. I would take this, layer it with my batting and backing fabric, and then quilt as normal. So I'm gonna come back to this sample real quick to show you I've done three different shapes, and I've done my stuffing in them already. I've layered them with a layer of batting you can see it right here along the outside edge, and then I have a backing fabric in place. Then it's time to do the quilting. And what quilting you do on your... On or around your Trapunto block is really what helps decide how much more prominent it is gonna be than the rest of the surface of your quilt. On this rectangle down here, I've done some simple shadow quilting going around the outside edge. It's fairly close together, making the background fall away a considerable amount. So this stands out quite a lot. If we move all the way up to the circle at the top, we've done very, very, very tiny stipple quilting all the way around our circle shape so it stands out a lot. Moved to the heart in the middle, and you can see I've done no quilting around it. So while this still has the same amount of stuffing as both of our other shapes, it doesn't stand out as much because the quilting is not done around it as tightly. So the quilting you do around your stuffed shape can either help accentuate that shape or make it not so apparent. So this same method can be used even on a more complicated quilting design. So I have a design here that is just a fun little quilting design. Here is the template for it. This will be provided as a download with this class so you can print this out. Either trace it onto your fabric, or you can actually pin this piece of paper onto your fabric and stitch through it to get this design onto your fabric. But you can do the same sort of method. So I have again my top layer of fabric. I have my piece of muslin or background fabric that I have stitched through both of them. I would then turn it over, and we're going to pick somewhere to start, make our little split, and do some stuffing. Now this is obviously some smaller shapes and smaller pieces then our rectangle that we did previously. So it can be a little bit more tricky to separate your layers, but this is a very important part. Because depending on how big a piece you're working on and how much stitching you've done, you've probably put a lot of time and effort into putting the stitching on your fabric. And if you accidentally cut through both those layers, you kind of have to start over 'cause there's no way that you won't see a cut on the front. So when I have smaller pieces like this, I find it's easier to separate the layers if I take my thumb and my middle finger, and I'm sort of going to slide them apart. I'm trying to get them to slide apart just a little bit to where I can grab and pinch just this back layer of fabric. So you can see I use my fingers to sort of slide the layers apart. Use my other hand to pinch my back layer so this is just the muslin. This finger has just the top layer of fabric. I'm going to keep a hold of this top layer of fabric on the back here so I don't accidentally cut it. And then I'm going to make a very, very small snip. I'm doing that because I'd rather make a small snip and then go back and make it larger than trying to do a large snip from the beginning and accidentally cutting through both of my layers. So I can now take my scissors, go again just through that back layer, make my slit a little bit bigger. And now I'm ready to do some stuffing. Now when we were doing our rectangle earlier, it's the same all the way around. Not a whole lot of points that you have to get down into, so it's a much easier shape to work with. This one can be a little bit more tricky, and you may need to just work in smaller sections. So where I like to start is wherever the smallest point is because I know it's going to take me a little bit more time and effort to get some batting all the way down to these points than it is up here around this larger, rounded area. So what I'm gonna do is the same technique where I sort of rolled the batting, stuffing over itself to make it little bit easier to grab like so. Hold it with my tweezers. And then I'm gonna work on getting it into this small slit. Which again this is why I like to use the tweezers. I find it's a little bit easier than trying to use my fingers and get it in there. So I'm taking my tweezers, and I am trying to push it down into this pointed area as much as I can. And you may think all right, I got it close enough. But if you look over on the right side, you can see I haven't gotten all the way down into this little point. And if you don't get it into all of these points all the way around this entire shape, you're going to have sort of this dead area in the middle all the way around where you didn't get stuffing to. So it's worth taking the extra time and making sure that you're really getting stuffing all the way down to that point. Okay, so once you do that, then you can continue stuffing your shape. So again, I like to just work in small, little pieces, sort of rolling my stuffing. Grabbing it with the tweezers. And then I can work on adding more stuffing to the rest of the shape. And I think I've got the bottom half stuffed as much as I want. So I'm gonna spin this around and try and get the rest of this batting up into the top of the shape like so. Just like that, and then again just like we did with our rectangle, I wanna make sure that I'm evenly distributing the batting all the way through the shape and can kind of use my fingers to make sure that it feels the same all the way around, and then I can move on to my next one. Now with a shape like this, I would probably go ahead and make all of my slits and all my pieces, stuff all my pieces, and then go back and stitch them all up because I'm not worried... It's kind of a small enough piece that while I'm working with it, I don't think anything is gonna fall out of here. And it just sort of saves me time to do one step, then the next, and then the next. So I have a piece here that I've already halfway done all of the stuffing to. You can see I stitched this one with green thread so it blended into the background fabric, as opposed to this white thread where it really stood out. And then once all of the shapes have been stuffed, my stitching even disappears a little bit further because I have so much extra dimension with all my little stuffed shapes. Again on the back you can see where I've added all my stuffing, gone back and done just little stitches to make sure everything stays in place. I could finish this, and then I would be ready to either use this as a block in a bigger quilt that I'm making, or just bind this and it's a small, little piece that I'm going to use for something else. What you do want to make sure you're not doing is overstuffing. Some of these along the edge are on the verge of being overstuffed. And what I mean by that is if you've done your stuffing and you can't lightly pull on your fabric and make it lay flat, then it's probably stuffed too much. When I actually attach this to either another block or I quilt this with my batting and backing fabric, I'm pretty positive that I can still get all of this extra fabric around the outside to lay flat. If I were to add any more batting to these shapes, it would cinch all this up so much that there's no way it would lay flat. So as you're working around your shape, just sort of pull on it a little bit in several areas and make sure that you can still get the fabric around your shape to lay flat. Now I wanna show you back to our original sample here. Again, I mentioned that this is a technique that can be done entirely by hand, and that's how it used to be done was entirely by hand. So when they would do their shape stitching or their quilting, it's done with a hand quilting stitch. So I have my needle here I used earlier. I'm gonna tie a knot at the end of my thread. And then if you were going to do this shape or whatever shape you want using your hand stitching needle and thread, you would want to use a backstitch. And the reason you wanna use a backstage is because something like a running stitch, there's a little bit of space between the stitches and some of your batting may come out. So with a backstage, you know it's gonna be perfectly secure. So I'm gonna do a fairly large backstitch. just so you can see what it looks like. But I'm going to start and we'll just start on the top so my knot would be on the top. You could start on the bottom, but we're going to take and make a stitch. Just one stitch like that. Again, this is a pretty large stitch. We're going to make one, pull our thread through. And now we get to the backstitched part. So I'm gonna go back to where I first started, insert my needle. And then it's gonna go under the back of the fabric and come up the same distance as two stitches would be. So what I mean by that is I have here's my first stitch and my needle is gonna come up this same length away, adding my second stitch. So I can pull this through. My first stitch is completed. To do the next one, I go back to where the thread goes down. I insert my needle. Again, come up about a stitch length to the left of my thread. You can pull it up like this, and I have my second stitch completed. I'll do one more. Again, my needle goes down where the thread went down last. And it's going to come up a stitch length to the left just like this. So this is a backstitch. This is a very secure stitch. You can see we have our stitches here on the right side of the fabric. The stitches look the same on the wrong side of our muslin here. And you would know that once you've done your shape that even if this is stuffed fairly a lot, that none of your batting is going to come out. So the backstitch is the stitch you want to use if you're doing this by hand. But you would wanna do a much smaller backstage. So I would probably do one that is right around an eighth of an inch in length. So I'll do a couple so you can see what a smaller backstitch would look like, but it's done the exact same way. I'm inserting my needle at the end of the last completed stitch, coming up about a stitch length to the left of where the thread comes up, and completing the stitch. And you would go all the way along whatever shape, whatever quilting design you're doing, just doing a back stitch all the way around just like that. So whether you want to take the time and do it entirely by hand or you want to speed it up just a little bit and stitch your shape on your machine, that is how you do the traditional Trapunto method. Again, you have to have an upper layer of fabric. You baste your piece of muslin in place. You use slit open your muslin, stuff it, and then you're ready to use this to make whatever you want. Whether you're adding your blocks together to make a larger quilt or you're using just one small piece maybe as a decorative wall hanging quilt, but you would quilt it however you see fit. Again, the more quilting you do, the tighter that quilting is together, the more the Trapunto is gonna be highlighted. No quilting to very little quilting, it's not going to stand out as much. And if you spend all the time doing this and you've done it especially by hand, you definitely want that to stand out. So I would recommend doing a more heavily quilted method. But again, this is the traditional Trapunto method. And now we're gonna move on and see how to do the machine Trapunto method.