This month our staff sewist Deborah brings us back to quilting basics with one of the single most important aspects of quilting: sewing that accurate quarter inch seam. Here's a link to the tutorial on our Tutorials Section for bookmarking. For those of you experienced quilters, do you have other tips or tricks for quarter inch accuracy?

How to Sew an Accurate Quarter Inch Seam

by Deborah

Sewing an accurate 1/4” seam allowance throughout your quilt construction is essential so that all pieces will fit together properly. First, select a seam guide and then test it for accuracy. The guide lines on the throat plate are not always accurate, so do not trust these measurements without testing first. Even a slight deviation will multiply with the number of pieces sewn together to make a quilt top.

Read more...

Did you notice that we snuck some new collections on our web site today? You can expect your July catalogs to arrive sometime after the Independence Day holiday, but in the meantime you can find everything new online.  The focal fabric of our new Ella's Wishes collection was begging for some throw pillows, so we wrote up a super-easy tutorial for throw pillow slipcovers for you.

You can find the tutorial for both of these cute pillows here, and the awesome focal fabric is available here.

Read more...

This week we continue our quilting themed tutorials with Mari's enlightening article. Mari is a longarm quilter who started out on her home machine, so she has a wealth of quilting knowledge from the perspective of quilting her own quilts and quilting for her customers. If you've ever felt daunted trying to pick the right kind of quilting design to finish off your beautiful new quilt top, read on. Mari's advice applies to those sending their quilts "out" to be quilted and those quilting at home. (And here's the link to the tutorial on our Tutorials page, for future bookmarking.) Inquiring minds want to know...Do you send your quilts to a longarmer or quilt them at home? What kinds of quilting designs appeal to you?

Read more...

I was so inspired by Sharla's Machine Quilting Basics tutorial last month, that I decided to try the Golden Threads method for myself. I decided I would share my process with photos, so everyone can benefit! We got so much great feedback to Sharla's tutorial that it sounds like machine quilting at home is quite the hot topic for many of you. Did anybody else stretch their machine quilting skills recently?

You can find my tutorial here, or read on below...

Read more...

One of our in-house pattern designers, Sharla, is a whiz at machine quilting. Many of us bring our personal projects to her for quilting because she does such an amazing job at making her machine quilting look like longarm quilting.

Last year she made the Chubby Chicks quilt (which is no small quilt), and quilted the entire thing on her home machine (no longarm!)...

Read more...