How to Use Old Fashioned Quilt Frame

Quilting The Old Fashioned Way

Author Photo

By D.J. Glawson

I come across all these articles on unlike quilting sites near machine quilting with your regular sewing auto versus quilting with a long arm machine. Frankly, they both scare me half to death! I have tried to do some motorcar quilting with my standard Bernina sewing machine, but it is difficult! How does one keep their stitches going where they desire them? Mine never follow the lines I am trying to follow. Everybody makes it audio so easy!

To further misfile the situation, I was non taught to quilt with a machine. According to my mother, using your sewing machine to quilt the top once information technology was together was sacrilege! She was born in 1906 so you had to do that part by manus. That was the only way to do things, correct? She had relented and sewed about of her pieces on the machine, unless she was doing a Alone Star or something with circles. They are ever easier to adjust your fabric and stitch when sewing them by hand.

As I started making quilts, I retrieve her talking about all these women quilting their quilts on a auto You would take thought they were out having an affair or something. She was determined that no decent quilter worth their salt would ever machine quilt a quilt!

I remember coming home from school and the living room would exist taken upwardly by a quilt. I would chop and bear in the firewood, consume dinner, practice my homework (when I got old enough to bring it dwelling), and so I would sit at the quilting frame with mama and grandma. Our quilting frames consisted of 4 pieces of ane inch by 2 inch pino with "C" clamps on each corner to concur them together. These corners would be held up on the backs of kitchen chairs and the sofa. She ever used denim for the textile strips on the wood as it was a much sturdier fabric, and they were fastened to the boards with tacks. No fancy upholstery tacks, either. Merely plain former blackness tacks!

We did everything that was quilted in a style very like to what is now chosen "stitching in the ditch." Of form we had not heard of that back and then. When we were finished with the blocks of the quilt, the fancy stitching was drawn onto the quilt top using a very high-tech apparatus called a string and a pencil! Grandma had a long piece of string with a pencil tied to it on one terminate. Approximately every 2 or three inches there was a knot all the way to the other end of the string. She e'er started closest to the edge of the fabric and she would hold the knot closest to the pencil with one hand while drawing an arc on the fabric with the pencil with her other hand. They never drew over the edge of the stitching they had already completed, either. This was the design for the outer fabric — like around the large star in the Alone Star quilts. They would do a few arcs and and so move further downward the side of the quilt and echo this process being careful to not go over the lines they had already drawn or the stitching they had already completed. They would continue like this until the entire outer perimeter was done. And and so they would quilt on those lines.

Beneath are a couple of pictures of a baby quilt I completed a couple of years ago. Information technology is a combination of freeform quilting to outline the design in the main body of the quilt — this existence Corduroy Bear — and the way I was taught to do the quilting. From what I have seen and read online about "stitching in the ditch," it is done by stitching very shut to the seam on i side. Every bit you can run across, we e'er did both sides of the seam. Mama said that put less stress on the seams and the quilts would final longer. My mother had a lot of things she believed about her way of quilting and those are things that accept stuck with me over the years. I approximate that is why information technology is and so difficult for me to acquire to quilt using a sewing machine.

A couple of other things my mother never did are:

— Never, ever, utilize a blanket for batting in your quilt. You use real batting or information technology wasn't a real quilt!

— Never use cotton for the backing if you planned on using the quilt on your bed. One e'er used flannel. The reasoning behind this was twofold. The flannel is warmer and it doesn't slide off the bed as easily.

I was given a couple of quilts a few years agone by one of my aunts who thought my mother and grandmother had made them, simply I can await at them and tell that they didn't make these quilts. How? The last two rules I just gave you. They take blankets in them instead of batting and they do not accept flannel every bit the backing.

Fast forward to today. I do understand her feelings. After all, she was raised in a time catamenia when they did about everything by hand. Now I hear about all these fancy feet for your machines and all the different kinds of quilting frames and machines that are available and information technology literally makes my caput spin. I accept come to enjoy my time hand quilting my quilts and I can look at something that I know has been made the way they used to be fabricated. I know in that location are a lot of you lot out there who feel the same well-nigh some of the things y'all practise, too.

My last thoughts on all this … go on up the skillful work! Information technology is and so worth it!