Finish-A-Long 2016 Tutorial Week - Quilt As You Go

Hello and welcome!  Today I am sharing a technique for Quilt As You Go with you.  I hope you will find it useful when you are making your quilts.  

There are several reasons why you might want to use a Quilt As You Go technique

• You have a big quilt and a domestic machine to quilt it on - this quilt was quilted in three sections and then put together to make a king size quilt

• You want to practice Free Motion Quilting - I did that on the above quilt too

• You want a perfectly aligned double-sided quilt - ok that may just be me!

I have found that there are several ways to Quilt As You Go and I'm showing you one of them that will suit all of these.

This is how I put together the above quilt from a pattern by my friend Mary Emmens, who has been designing quilts based on traditional welsh woollen blankets. 

A feature of these blankets it that they are double sided and each side is quite different as the dominant colours are reversed.  

So I thought it would be a great idea to do that with this quilt, hence the need for a Quilt As You Go method without the use of sashing.

You could equally use this method of Quilt As You Go and use a square of backing fabric instead of a block, but choose a backing fabric with a small random pattern that doesn't need pattern matching.



Step one Make your blocks.  Layer and quilt them leaving a wide margin around the edge unquilted.  The design of these blocks made that easy as there is a strip of background fabric on the outside edge, plus cornerstones.  

If your block doesn't have this reference point just mark where you are stopping the quilting, a generous 1.5" - 2.5"  from the edge.

When all blocks are quilted in the middle they should be trimmed through all layers to your unfinished block size.

At the edge all layers can still be separated.

Step two Join the backing fabric with a normal 1/4" seam - the orange seam in this photo.  The wadding and backing fabric are folded back out of the way.

Step three  There is an overlap of wadding in the photo below.  

To prevent a double thickness forming a ridge in your finished quilt this needs to be trimmed away, so that the wadding from one block butts nicely against the other without wrinkling up.  Take some time to do this and be sure not to cut your backing fabric. 

I cut all the excess from one block so that my wadding join is not directly over the fabric seams. 

Step four Join the wadding.  I prefer to do this by hand with a ladder stitch (link to tutorial on ladder stitch) - my needle shows how to create this stitch which forms a rung like a ladder from one piece of wadding to the other and draws them together.   You might have seen this stitch if you have had an operation ...similar purpose!   

It only takes a few minutes to do this and doesn't have to be pretty as we are covering this up.    

Alternately a piece of fine weight iron on interfacing would work too though I haven't tried it!  You just want to hold the wadding in place so that it doesn't fold back on itself, wrinkle up and to keep things robust. 

Step five Join the top fabric.

Overlap the quilt top fabric.  Fold under the 1/4" seam allowance of one block and stitch to the seam allowance lying flat underneath.  I do this by hand using an invisible blind hem stitch or slip stitch.  (Tutorial on this stitch at the end of this post)

Alternatively you can just top stitch this seam by machine, in which case you will need to stop and start away from the edge or unpick a few stitches when you are ready to join the next section.

At this point you may decide to add further quilting over the join, for decorative purposes, for added strength to the join or because your wadding requires more quilting for stability.  

Step six Join all blocks together in a similar fashion.  For this quilt I joined them into sections to minimise the long seams.    Here it is in three sections...

...leaving one long seam to join. 

Finally you have a quilt that just requires binding.  

Two sides of the same quilt, well aligned thanks to Quilt As You Go!

I used this method of Quilt As You Go because I wanted to align my blocks on this double sided quilt but it would be equally valid for joining sections of a large quilt as in my first example at the top of this post. In that quilt I just joined three sections the whole width of the quilt,  instead of lots of blocks.  

It also works for practicing FMQ, either in blocks or longer sections that fit well under your machine.

It doesn't work for blocks or sections that are quilted right up to the edge as in the charity quilt below.  This was joined in the more usual way with a contrast sashing.  

Hope you find this technique useful in your future quilting projects.  Perhaps it will help you finish a large project on your Finish-A-Long list for Quarter 2 that you have been putting off because it is so big.  

Our next tutorial is by Jennie @Clover & Violet - she has a tutorial for making a cell phone/ID holder - will you be joining me, reading it tomorrow?