Piecing Tutorial or Maybe Not

Old School Quilting 101

A friend recently asked me how I piece a quilt. I am not one to do things the easy way. I'm an old school quilter because my sewing machine and I have a love/hate relationship. I hate it and it loves to torture me. So I took a few pics of how I start the whole quilt process. Yes the fabric is wrinkled. At the time I traced the templates it was fresh and crisp but I have a lot of cats a cat or two. I made the mistake of leaving the fabric out on the sewing table and they had a party on it, thus the wrinkles. I will iron it before continuing with the whole quilting process but knew if I waited for that to happen before taking the pics I'd never get around to ironing and never get the pictures taken. So please before starting any quilting or piecing wash and iron your fabrics.

The picture below is of a template on fabric. The hole's punched in the template are to make dots where one can then connect up the sewing lines if one sewing by hand.

This is a picture of the traced template, and a small see thru quilting ruler. I love this little ruler I bought it almost 18 yrs ago and have taken very good care of it. I tend to lose things so this is sort of a modern day miracle. So the dots are connect and now there are sewing lines and a very obvious 1/4 inch seam.

Here are the triangles all nicely traced and ready to be cut out.

Here is the fabric piece all cut out and ready to be sewed, this is the back side of the fabric. Did I mention that all tracing is done on the wrong side of the fabric? Well all tracing of templates is done on the wrong side of the fabric and if you are using dark fabric there are nifty white dressmakers pencils that are great for tracing onto very dark fabrics.

Now below you see the right side of the fabric piece a little blurry but you get the idea.

So Sharon-I hope this helps you understand a little about how I hand piece quilts. Remember use only 100% cotton fabric and wash and iron it before you start tracing your templates onto the fabric. Then again make your quilts out of whatever fabric you want to. The 100% cotton is the best for handwork but anything can be a quilt. There are supposedly rules to quilting but I see them more as guidelines. ;)