3D Quilting Session 7: How to Hand Quilt

So I just wanna talk a little bit about hand quilting, because handheld thing can be a fun option to do especially when you have these folded 3D elements where they might be a little bit tricky to get under your presser foot. You're afraid something is gonna get cut or you don't wanna accidentally stitch down some of these fun folded elements, you can always do some hand quilting. So a little bit about the supplies you need for hand quilting. First one is thread. Because when you're doing hand quilting, you really wanna make sure you're using a hand quilting thread. Not only is it a little bit thicker than just your general piecing but it won't tangle up. It really just makes hand quilting a lot easier. So definitely you want some hand quilting thread. you'll need some needles. I have some needles here. They're hand quilting needles. Again, make sure you have the things specified for what you're actually doing. And hand quilting needles have a much smaller eye to them. The entire needle is about the same diameter all the way around, whereas general sewing needles you can see it goes out a little bit around the eye. So you'll need some hand quilting needles. And then a thimble of some kind if you choose to use thimbles. I'm gonna show you you can use the thimbles or not it's really a personal preference. But what you wanna make sure is you have a thimble that is meant for quilting. So it has a flat top. So your needle won't fall off of the thimble in any way. Or if you're like me and you have longer fingernails, you can get a thimble that doesn't have a top on it. So you can still wear one and half fingernails but it still has that same guard on the tip here that is the same as if you had the flat top thimble there. So needles, thread and thimble is all you need to really get started in quilting if you're going to do quilting without a hoop. I just wanna show you a hoop real quick. And this is again, personal preference whether you want to hand quilt with the hoop or not. If I am working at my desk or working at a table I tend to not use one 'cause I can lay everything flat. If I have a bigger project and I'm gonna go sit in front of the TV and do some hand quilting while I'm watching a movie, I do like having the hoop 'cause it makes it a little bit easier to hold. They do look a lot like an embroidery hoop. Sometimes they are a little bit thicker this way than embroidery hoops. Sometimes those are a little bit thinner but they come in all sorts of sizes and they also come in different shapes. I have a round one here but you can get square or rectangular ones if that works better for whatever quilt you're working on. When you put your fabric or your quilt top your quilts because obviously we have it layered with our batting and our backing fabric. So when you put your quilts in your hoop, if you've done embroidery you're used to pulling this drum tight, super tight across here for embroidery. For hand quilting you don't want it as tight. So you can see there's a lot of... If I hold this up there's a lot of give to this. And that's about how you want it in your hoop. If you're gonna use your hoop for hand embroidery I'm not going to use it for the sample I'm gonna show today for a couple of reasons. One, I have a really small sample here. So I could have gotten a really small hoop, but then my hoop might distort my design because I'd have my folded edge stuck in my hoop and I didn't want that. So I'm not going to use one for the sample here. But what I'm gonna do is just some really simple straight line quilting. I'm a big fan of straight lines. I like having everything, just look nice and linear. So that's what I'm gonna add on here. And what I've done, I've already done half here and I'm gonna work a little bit on this half. And I've simply just drawn some lines that I'm then gonna stitch over with my hand quilting thread. I've started at the edge and I have brought the quilting in underneath my folded 3D shape, enough that even if when I press this, if it is poofed up as much as it can go, there still is quilting underneath it. If you look on the back, you can see I didn't go all the way to the center but I went as far as you'd be able to see it from the right side. And so that's what I'm gonna do on the remaining sides here. So in order to make that a little bit easier I've folded this and I'm just going to sort of pin it back out of my way so I don't have to keep moving it as I'm going. And as I showed earlier with just a little bit of a steam of the iron you can really easily poof those back up. So don't worry if they're starting to look a little bit flat. Now, when it comes to your hand quilting needles, you can do different lengths. And this is personal preference. I personally like using these shorter length needle but there is a longer one you can use too if that's a little bit easier for you. I like to quilt without a thimble. So I find that holding onto the shorter needle is a little bit easier. I have taken and tied a tiny notch in the end of my thread. I think I can hold that so you can see it. It's a teeny tiny knot right there at the end of my thread. And I have a little bit of a tail. And now what I want to do to start hand quilting is I need to bury my knot in my layers of fabric here. So to do that because I have a shape here where I'm starting right on the edge, I could actually lift up this top fabric a little bit, put my needle under there and start that way. Because then I get my knot hidden underneath but I really wanna make sure that that knot is buried in the middle of the batting. So I'm actually gonna start out here and I am going to put my needle down into the fabric. And I went through the fabric and the batting but I didn't come all the way through to the backside. 'Cause I don't wanna see any little stitch there. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull my thread and I'm going to pull it. Did you hear a little pop? That that is the knot going into the fabric. So now I know that my knot is buried in my fabric. I can cut off my extra long tail that I left. For some reason, cut off the tail and then I can start quilting. And I know that I have my knot buried in my fabric. Let's pull that out a little. And it's not going to go anywhere and I have my tail cut off, or I could take a much larger stitch and leave that long tail hidden somewhere back under there in the batting and I'm ready to go. I have it nice and secured there. And now I can start doing the hand quilting stitch. And it's just a simple up and down motion with your thread. But what you wanna do is if you've done hand sewing before, a lot of times you're coming in at an angle like this and you're picking up a stitch like that. But when you do it that way, you tend to not have your stitch go all the way through to the back, which we need to have happen if we are actually going to quilt through our layers. So you wanna make sure you start with your needle, it's gonna be perpendicular to your fabric. I'm going straight down through my fabric like that. Now I have my other hand underneath and I'm feeling for when that tip of the needle just barely comes through the fabric. When this happens, you're gonna do what's called a rocking motion. And you can do that either by, if you like to wear the thimble, you can wear a thimble. You can use the thimble to lean it over and then push your fabric through. But that is not what it's comfortable for me. I like to just pinch my needle like this. Again, I'm rocking it over and then I'm gonna bring it straight back up through the fabric. So you can see, I have a stitch here on the front and I also have my stitch here on the back. I've gone all the way through those layers and that's because I did that straight down, rocked my needle over and then came up. Now, this is the part where if you wanted to, even if you were gonna use that sort of pinching technique to put your needle through, you could still put a thimble on right now to be able to push your needle through the fabric the rest of the way like that. For me, this isn't that stiff a fabric so I don't find that I need my thimble. So this is all there is to it to hand quilting. Again, I'm going to go straight down through my fabric like that. I can feel with my hand underneath that my needle has just gone through. I'm going to rock my needle over and take another stitch like so. And I'm trying to keep all of my stitches relatively the same length. Because I want this to look nice and even, I don't wanna have two stitches that look about the same. I'll make one that's really extra long. You can see how that one's much longer. I don't necessarily want that. I want all of my stitches to look nice and even. So a lot of times people will say you have to do really, really tiny stitches when you're doing hand quilting, really small stitches. Or there's such a thing as big stitch quilting, where you do really big stitches. I think it's important to do what is a natural stitch length for you that you can replicate multiple times. So if your natural stitch length is right about here, that may seem fairly long to somebody but that might just be what your natural stitch length is. So it might take you a little bit of practice to kind of figure out what your natural stitch length is and what just seems to work well for you. But once you've got it down, then you can easily keep doing the same size stitch all the way around or all the way along or whatever your design is or whatever your pattern is. And have a nice, even like these ones over here, these are all nice and even. They're about the same stitch length all the way along, they're evenly spaced and it looks really nice once you're done. So that would be how you just do a very simple hand quilting stitch and you can do that all along your piece. Now, I just wanna bring in this piece here 'cause it has a lot more folded elements and a lot more 3D elements to it than just our pinwheel did. So with this again, you could do the same kind of straight line quilting and go all the way around. Or because this is flowers, this might be really fun to do some wavy lines coming out. You can put some Leafs on there, just something to give it a little bit more of a whimsical design than just all these blocks around. So you could use either thread that kind of blended into your background. You can use again, if you're gonna add some leafs on there you can use hand quilting thread in a different color. Hand quilting thread does come in a variety of different colors. So you can have quilting that blends in and quilting that stands out. I always think it's really fun if you're going to be doing hand quilting and you're going to be spending a lot of time on it, then you might as well do it in a color that stands out. That way you can really be proud of your finished result and actually be able to see all that hand quilting that you spent so much time doing and it really shows on your project. So, especially if you're new to these 3D blocks and you're afraid they might be difficult to machine quilt, give hand quilting a try. It's really relaxing, really pretty easy. And I think you'll really like the end result. If you give it a try.