Sewing an accurate scant quarter-inch seam allowance

It’s hard to believe (well for me anyway) that the world wide web, that we take so much for granted these days, wasn’t around when I first fell in love with quilting. When I first started in my teens, I taught myself the basics from books and magazines, using templates cut from cereal packets, and cutting everything with scissors!! It wasn’t until I came back to this wonderful craft in my twenties that I discovered the huge wealth of information, generously given for free, on the hundreds of quilting websites and blogs that now exist. I have learnt so much from these wonderful quilters, and continue to do so.

Many of these talented people write blogs where they share their latest creations as well as the latest tips and tricks to help us all in our projects. You can see some of them in the right-hand column in My Blog List. It is these people I would like to share with you in this series of how-to blogs. I already include links in the “I’m stuck, help!!” section on sewmotion, but I thought I would highlight some of the essentials to help those new to quilting.

This week we’re starting with the scant ¼” seam allowance. Now, I have to admit, I have learnt something new today… I like learning new things, but this was a bit of a surprise… my ¼” stitch on my machine is actually not a ¼”!! I know, shocking! Well in fact, it is a ¼”, but not a scant ¼”. You will come across the term scant in most quilt patterns, and it means that you need to sew about a thread’s width shy of ¼” to give room for the thread and the fold in the seam. 

So, for the purposes of this blog, I followed a couple of online tutorials to check my own seams. The first is from the lovely Amy Ellis at Amy’s Creative Side. She uses a ¼” foot on her machine, whereas I use my standard foot with the needle moved to the right (the ¼” stitch setting on my Janome). 

If your machine doesn't have this setting, most machines allow you to move the needle to the required position. To set this up for a ¼” seam, place a quilter's ruler on top of the lowered feed dogs so the ruler lies nice and flat (above left). Align the right edge of the ruler with the right edge of your presser foot. Slowly lower your needle so that it's not quite touching the ruler, then move the needle until it lines up with the first ¼” line on the ruler. Now you can use the edge of your normal presser foot as a guide to run the edge of your fabric against. If you would like a clearer mark, you can stick a thick piece of tape onto to your machine to give you more of a run up - The Fat Quarter Shop has a great video showing more about this guide here.

So back to checking for scantness...

Following Amy’s tutorial I cut a few 2½” fabric strips, then used the first two to sew a ¼” seam as normal. However, when I came to check my block size, I was out! This explains so much! It may seem to you that this tiny amount wouldn’t matter, hey, its only a smidgen out right? Wrong! If you imagine this amount out on say 20 blocks… that smidgen soon adds up to more than an inch and will cause problems if you're following a pattern.

Now, I probably haven’t noticed this before as I’ve used the same stitch consistently throughout my sewing, so I wouldn’t have been out when matching seams and rows to each other. However, when I’ve come to measure the whole quilt I do sometimes come up short. As I am normally following my own pattern, I've just gone with it, but if this is your first quilt, or if you're enjoying some complicated piecing, you'll want to get it right.

So, following Amy again, I went back to the machine and moved my needle .8mm to the right, setting it from 8.3 to 9, and tried again.

And what do you know, it worked perfectly! I’ll just have to now remember change this setting every time I sew.

If you don’t have a ¼” foot or stitch on your machine, this tutorial from Connecting Threads explains how to place tape down on the front of your machine to use as a guide for your fabric. Once you have tried this method, I suggest you then do as Amy did and press your seams open to measure your block, just to make sure your seam is a scant one.

Today I'm linking up with Tip & Tutorials Tuesday over at Late Night Quilter, and Sew Fresh Quilt's Let's Bee Social - come and join in the fun!

Sunday Stash #12

It feels like I haven’t added to my stash for ages, so when I had a hit of inspiration for a new quilt kit, I just had to go on a fabric hunt… which of course ended at Doughty’s! I bought a some of these Riley Blake prints back at Festival in August, and found that a couple of my Konas matched perfectly with this Fancy Free range. 

One of my many grand plans has always been to bring out a collection of pre-cut fabric sets, with quilt kits to go with them. I decided to go back to my Beginner’s Quilt and made this cute and very girly version, and then developed a kit designed to encourage and help those new to quilting. 

Each kit will contain 36 6½” squares, the border and binding strips to make the top, plus grey Aurifil thread for the piecing, and full instructions with links to the photographic free tutorial on sewmotion.com. These will be available in my shops very soon.

My Stripper sets are now available to buy in my Folksy and Etsy shops, where you have a choice of Rainbow, Hot and Cool colourways. 

Each set contains twenty 2½” x 44” strips in Kona Solids. Add some white or a soft grey as a base colour and you can make so many different designs, including my All Squared Up and my Fox in the Nine Patch quilts.

I’m also very excited to announce that I will be at Stockton’s Sparkles Christmas Market this year. I’ve not attended this event before, but looking at pictures from last year, and talking to other local small business owners, it sounds like a great four-day market with 30 log cabins for us independent sellers, plus Christmas lights, carols and hopefully mulled wine to get us all in the Christmas spirit. This festive fun will be in Stockton’s lovely redeveloped town centre from 26^th to 29^th November.

As you can imagine, the next couple of months are going to be very busy building up stock for a four-day market… eek!! A couple of other new products I’ve been working on are these two cushions. Inspired by Sew Fresh Quilt’s Dog Gone Cute QAL, I designed these using the stitch & flip method. They take a while to make but I’m really pleased with them, Parmo (a Middlesbrough food ‘delicacy’) and the phrase T-T-Teessider are both unique to my local area, but I’m thinking I could adapt these to all manner of phrases… when I find the time.

  

Before the ‘mass production’ starts, I’m looking forward to running another workshop for Doughty’s next weekend. This time we’re doing my Snowballs in Spring quilt, can’t wait to meet my quilters and have some fun!

A friend is holding a Macmillan coffee morning next weekend, which I’m sad to be missing, but I have managed to make a quilt for her to auction off - sometimes I just love my stash! Hopefully she’ll be able to raise a bit for a very worthwhile cause, which let’s face it, most of us sadly have reason to know about these days.

For more quilting fun and inspiration from around the world, pop over to Molli Sparkles’ Sunday Stash – I’ll see you there.

Update from Sewmotion HQ

It’s amazing how productive you can be after a holiday! Which is just as well as I have so much on my to-do list right now. I know it may be a little too early for some, but for us makers Christmas is not too far away at all, so last week was spent building up some stock for the coming season. It was so nice to spend three days just sewing with no keyboard in sight!

I’ve been looking forward to using these Riley Blake fabrics (centre pic), a Doughty’s buy at Festival, and I think these new pencil cases/make-up cases are so cute! I used shower-proof fabric for the linings that make them easy to wipe clean, and also adds some body to the case. So we have this new collection, as well as some others made from ‘the stash’, and of course I had to make some small pouches to go with them. I’m planning to make some larger pouches in matching fabrics and selling them as sets, these would make lovely gifts don’t you think?!

Some items that have been selling well lately are my novelty pencil cases, so I thought I would make some more, this time a little larger so they will hold all the ‘stuff’ for school, as well as some large purses. These will hold cash, cards and keys – ideal for the young at heart.

A friend has been saying for a while that I should personalise my items, so I decided to try out my embroidery stitches on the machine, and came up with these lovely name labels, so sweet. These are now an added option in my Folksy shop.

Having spent three days sewing, it was then time to photograph and upload everything – wow, this took sooo long! I’m starting to realise that because I do some many different things, sewing, writing, photography, website stuff, that I tend to forget how to do things and need to re-teach myself regularly. So when it came to taking the pics and then writing the blurb on Folksy, my muscle memory took some time to kick in. Three days later (!) I now have some lovely fresh items on Folksy… though Etsy will have to wait a while I'm afraid.

Having got all this finished last week, I was glad to start something new on Monday, and I finally got round to making up some jelly rolls from my Kona stash. 

It has always been my intention to use these gorgeous cottons in luscious colours to design and make up some quilt kits from pre-cuts, mainly 2½” fabrics strips and charm squares. The first is a 20-stripper in a lovely rainbow colour scheme – I think the two greys sit in so well.

This second strip set is actually made up of 21 strips, and will hopefully be my first kit for this quilt...

I designed this one ages ago, I think I was actually sitting on a beach in Thailand at the time… useless at relaxing! Anyway, my brain hurt trying to work out the measurements, so I knew this one had to be made first before writing the instructions, which is the plan for the rest of today. I am hoping to get some pre-cuts for sale in my shop soon and will let you know when.

Before all that though, I managed to squeeze in another puppy dog for the Dog Gone Cute QAL over at Sew Fresh Quilts.

I think I’ve cracked the fabrics now, that grey background sets off the white really well, and I love this Louden Flitsy range. I think it may well be a wall hanging with three dogs, and the words Dog Gone Cute in there somewhere. I’m enjoying following someone else’s pattern for a change, and Lorna’s is very easy to follow, though I do find I have to concentrate more than usual with the piecing, but that’s just me. To join in this quilt-along, pop over to Sew Fresh Quilts where Lorna is sharing the instructions for the puppy blocks over the next few weeks. There will then be a Blog Hop in October, which includes me (!) – I’ll let you know more about that nearer the time.  

For more quilty love and inspiration pop over to Lorna's Let's Bee Social and WIP Wednesday over on Freshly Pieced.