How to Make a Quilt Label Out of Fabric

Adding a label to your project is an important part of the quilt making process. Sometimes people aren't fond of making labels but the method that I'll show you is quick and easy, and it'll make adding a label to your quilt completely painless. The first thing you want to do is create your label using your computer. So you want to use something like Microsoft Word and you want to think about what kind of information you want to include on your label. A lot of times people will include some kind of a greeting. If it's for a wedding, something like warm wishes on your wedding day. You usually want to put who the quilt is for and who the quilt was made by. Some people also like to add some location details. Where the quilt was made or where the people are living that the quilt will go to. So you can decide what kind of information you want to include and you use Word on your computer to create the label. And usually, I choose a special font. That's one of the fun parts. One of my favorite fonts is Papyrus, and I also love Giddyup, which is kind of a Western, childlike font, or there's Stencil. There are all different kinds of fonts that you can choose and I would choose sort of a pretty one for the main parts of the label and maybe more of a plain font for the less important parts. I usually make the made for line and the quilt makers name line larger than the other fonts. And because I don't like to waste the pretreated paper that I'm gonna, fabric paper, that I'm going to feed through the printer, I usually, in addition to the label that I'm focusing on, I'll make a couple of other generic labels too. Just something like, "Made for you by Diane with love." That way I can print several labels on the same piece of paper and I don't waste any. So when I say paper, I'm actually talking about a pretreated fabric that's attached to paper so that you can run it through your printer. So once you have everything set up in Word the way you'd like to do it, you would want to run one of these printable type products through your printer. And you just want to pay attention to the way your printer loads and make sure that you load the product so that the printing will actually be done on the fabric side rather than the paper side. And I always print a test run on just real, actual, plain paper before I run the fabric paper through the printer. So once I run it through, I have my labels, and then it's time to trim. So I usually trim the label so that there's about 5/8 of an inch outside of the text on all the sides. And that leaves a little margin of white space and it also leaves me a quarter of an inch seam allowance all the way around. So I've trimmed, and I end up with my perfect little label just like so, and then I'm gonna add a little border to my label. So I'm going to add strips like so. And it doesn't really matter if you want to add the top and bottom strips first or the side strips first. I usually add the side strips first just because I like the way that looks, And then I add the top and bottom strips. So you're just going to put things right sides together like so and sew with a quarter inch seam, and then press 'em back like so, and then add the top and bottom strips in the same way so that you end up with this. So there's my little label. So at this point, I don't want to trim quite yet. I just want to leave it. And I have a little backing that I've cut for my label. And so this won't be shown, it won't be seen, it'll be hidden between the label and the quilt backing, but it's nice to have it be something that kind of coordinates a little bit because sometimes the edges of it will peak out just a tad. So I want to lay the label face down or right sides together on the backing. And at this point, I want to trim everything even. So this is where I square up the edges of the label and where I trim away the excess part of the backing. So then, also, with a quarter inch seam all the way around and you would use matching thread. I've used contrasting thread here just so that you can see the seam lines more easily. So you wanna sew all the way around and then you wanna to take your scissors and you'll trim those little corners off, which you can see I've already done. That just helps to reduce the bulk in the corners and it'll make the label be a nicer shape. So then we're going to turn it over, take our scissors, and you can see that I've cut a slit into the back, the backing. And I want to leave about an inch uncut on each end. So I've cut the slit, and now just like you were making a pillow, I'm gonna take the label and turn it in right sides out. Turn it just like so, and then I'll take a scissors or some other pointed object and very gently, so I don't push through, poke out the corners just like so, I'll do that on all four corners, and then I'll get my little label. So here we have it, all ready to sew to the back of the quilt. And at this point, what you want to do is get out a thimble, a needle, and thread because you'll be sewing the label to the back of the quilt by hand. And you can use either a blind stitch or a whip stitch to add the label to the back of the quilt. And here's a quilt that's had a nice little label added to it. They sewed it with a blind stitch by hand and you can see they used the date, the person's name that it was for, the name of the quilt maker, and then also the name of the fabric company. In this case, this was done for a quilting magazine so the fabric company was an important piece of information that they wanted to have on the back of the quilt. So next time you finish a project, don't skip the label process. Use this quick and easy method and you can preserve all the information that you want to for generations to come.