Hummingbird Hoop

This wall hanging project is perfect for a library or an office or just for any book lover. It looks like a tall skinny bookshelf, and I'm going to walk you through how we piece together these fabric strips to look like the spines of the books, and we'll talk about some creative uses of applique. And I'll show you how we put together the border and then we're going to do some free motion quilting on this, and you can see how our lines turned out on the back a little bit better than the front. But for our free motion quilting, we're going to be using the Hummingbird hoop from the Grace Company. Now this hoop.

Allows you to clip your project to each of these 4 rails and then with the ball bearing wheels on the bottom of the legs, you can drive your project around under the needle to get your beautiful free motion stitching. It's easy to control, it makes your stitching look great and it's fun to do. Stick around and I'll show you how. To get started making our bookshelf wall hanging, we'll need to cut some strips, and I've written out the instructions for you in a PDF download so that you have um all of the exact sizes for widths and heights, and it's not exact dimensions for. For exact blocks you have a lot of wiggle room and play.

So in the instructions I say cut strips that are between 1 and 2 inches wide and 7 and 10 inches tall, and within that range you've got a lot of room to play with because this this project is actually really good for scraps. I took all of my scraps out of the bin and cut as long of strips as I could out of those those scraps and then. Uh take my long strips and sort of arrange them and then cut off the excess so you don't need to cut down to an exact size yet. Take your long strips, you can even cut with the fabric strips if you're not working off of scraps. And have different widths and different, well, you don't really need to do cut different heights yet, but different widths to play with.

So I cut. 1 inch wide strips, 124, 1.5, all the way up to 2 inches wide, and of course you can go wider. Your 2 inch wide strip is going to give you a 1.5 inch wide book spine because we're using 1/4 inch seam allowances. So, You can of course plot it all out and get your exact dimensions if you want to know exactly what size of rectangle you're going for and cut it exactly to that, but I have found in my experience just cutting long strips in various widths allows you to then lay them out and play around with the sizes and the arrangement, and you can really be creative with your combination of prints and colors. So get your your fabric strips or your rectangles cut and arrange them.

So I like to have my bottoms, uh, the bottoms of my strips aligned so then I can see the heights and then. If there is, you know, excess strip down here, once you get the height, how you want it to be, then you can cut it off even down here. So we're shooting for getting our book strips to a width of 8.5 inches when everything is when all of these seams are stitched together. So, You can, you know, start stitching your pieces together and then say, OK, I'm only at 7 inches. I can add another couple of strips, or I like to measure it out and you know, subtract out my seam allowances here so I know exactly what strips I'm working with for each block.

So I've got my strips cut and then at the upper edges of your strips you'll need your background fabric and you want to cut your background fabric to the same width as your strips and tall enough so that when they are stitched together you get a total height of 10. 3/4 inches. And we're going to be trimming it down to 10.5, but I like a little buffer so that when we're squaring it up, we have a little bit of wiggle room if we need to trim it up a little bit more on one side than the other. So 10 and 3/4 when these are stitched together and I do the same thing with my strips of my background fabric. I just cut long strips of the different widths, 11 and 1/4, 1 1/2, etc.

and then so you'll see that's why these ones are long. I'm just going to stitch that together and then trim that off to 10. 3/4, but these ones I have cut to the correct size. So that when these are stitched together, they'll be 10 and 3/4. So, this is really fun, putting together the different colors and prints, and then we're going to take these right sides together.

And we're going to stitch our seam across here. So I'm going to Do some chain piecing here. So I'm getting all of these lined up. And I'm going to stitch them one right after the other. Using my 1/4 inch seam allowance.

And you can line up a whole bunch of these and zip them right off. I'm only going to do 4. You can get the idea. So there's one, and then for my chain piecing, I'm just going to butt this one up right against. The other one.

And There's this one. quarter in And we're going to press these and we're pressing our seam allowances away from the background fabric, and that serves two purposes. If your background fabric is a little bit lighter, if you don't want to see your seam allowances through it, but also by pressing your. Your fabric away from the background fabric, you're pressing it toward the book spine. And that just allows the book spine to sort of pop out a little bit more with that seam allowance, the thickness of that seam allowance behind it.

So I am pressing this and when you're pressing your strips, you want to make sure that you do not. Pull your strips. In any way We're not, we don't want to stretch them, we don't want to pull them, um, crooked. There is some amount of squaring up that we're going to be doing after sewing each seam. We want to make sure our edges stay straight and square.

All right, and then we're just gonna do a visual check after each. See And make sure everything is still straight and if there's anything weird going on, you wanna catch it right away and square it up because if you keep stitching. Your strips together while things are not square, you'll end up with. Some real wonky seams by the end. So these look good right now.

Now I'm gonna start stitching my strips together. So we're just going to flip these right sides together. And I'm going to do some more chain piecing. So I'm gonna do 2 pairs at a time. Making sure my edges stay aligned.

Yeah. And then the next set can go right after it. And these strips getting stitched together can go pretty quickly, especially if you arrange your strips for each of your three blocks at once. And you can get all of your strips pieced together at once. All right, I'm gonna trim those apart.

And then when we press these, you want to press your seam allowances toward the side that has the least amount of background fabric, so that. You have, like I said, if you've got a lighter fabric for your background fabric. You don't want that those seam allowances to be showing through. As much as possible, so I'm pressing my seam allowances this way because we have a smaller amount of background fabric there. And then we're pressing.

Toward this strip because it has a smaller amount of background fabric. And we're going to do another visual check and make sure everything is staying straight. And if we need to do any squaring. It looks like I have something weird happening right here, so I'm gonna take my ruler and my rotary cutter. And just try and square that up as much as I can, so I'm aligning a line on my ruler with my seam.

And I'm just going to Trim that little bit, a little notch away. Make sure I get this straight all the way up. Here we go. And this one looks good. So then I'm going to join.

My pairs of strips together. Right sides together. So you're going to repeat this process until you get Your block that is 8.5 inches. Wide And you're going to do this for 2 of the blocks. And then the 3rd block, as you saw on my finished wall hanging, the 3rd block has an applique.

And so for that block, I only did my book spines 6 inches wide, and then I did a background fabric strip. So there's part of my. My spines, I would press that seam toward this strip because it has the least amount of background fabric. So keep building it out, and then, like I was saying, for your applique block, I left this section as background fabric instead of doing spines for these last couple of inches of this 8.5 inch wide block. The only reason is because my applique is large enough that it's going to be covering up most of this area, so I figured why put spines there if it's going to be covered up anyway.

But you can be really creative with your appliques. I'm doing. A cat sitting on my bookshelf, but you could do anything personalize it to you. You could do a little potted plant, you can do um a vase with flowers, something a little bit taller. It's totally up to you.

Be creative. So, here is my block, and I still need to square this up to 8.5 inches wide, and like I said, we're squaring it up to 10.5 inches tall. We had stitched it to 10 and 3/4, but we want to. Come to 1015. So I'm actually going to align this on my.

Grid here So squaring it up with the edge, I want to make sure my edge is at a right angle. And then I'm going to line that up with my cutting mat. And square that up. So we're at right angles all the way around. And I'm at.

8.5 inches wide, so there is. My 3rd block for the 1st 2, you would have all book spines. So then when we put our blocks together, here's my other blocks. So all book spines. And I've got my border strips in between.

So then we're going to stitch our last block, our bottom block. To the bottom of this, so we're going right sides together and the dimensions of uh your strips are going to be in your instructions. So we're going to line this up, and I like to stitch this with my block side up so I can see my seam allowances and make sure those are staying. In the right direction as I'm selling this. And you may have noticed these little strips here.

These little appliques on my book spines, those are. The salvages of some of my fabrics. Sometimes the fabric companies will print on the salvages the collection name and the designer name, and sometimes they're really cool looking, and I thought that they looked like the titles on book spines. So, just like you would for any applique, I thought feasible web. And attached The Salvages, those little.

The the pretty words that looked like book spines. I fused those on to some of those book spines just for a little added decorative effect. I think it gives it a little more depth and visual interest, completely optional, and the applique on this bottom block totally optional as well. You could very easily just do 3 blocks full of book spines. That is also fun.

So I'm pressing my seam allowances toward my border pieces. And I've used a wood grain fabric for my border. But just a nice dark solid would look good as a. A bookshelf Border as well. So I have my my borders, my 3 blocks here.

And for these, these strips on the edges, we're going to do those next, and I've got. My strip here 1.5 inches wide. And I actually just cut a width of fabric strip. So I'm going to have extra to trim off at the bottom. And I like to do that because I like to have, you know.

Have extra just in case my dimensions get weird. And I'm going to stitch this again with my block side up. So that I can see my seeing allowances. Right sides together. So we're going to do our 1.5 inch strips on the right and the left sides.

All right, I've got my right and left border strips stitched on, and I, I left my strips long, so I'm gonna trim that off and then we're going to do the same thing to do the top and bottom strips. Those are a little bit wider. I'm gonna cut those at. 2.5 inches wide. To get a little bit of a wider.

Border at the top and the bottom, so we're gonna do the same thing and my strips again, they're longer just trim off the excess. So I'm going to do the same to attach my. Top and bottom borders. OK, I've got my top and bottom border stitched on, so there's my bottom. I'm just going to trim my top border here so that it aligns.

With my side. And I waited until my borders were on to do my applique because my applique is going to kind of bleed over onto the border. And I waited to do, there's a couple of. My, my salvage spine titles that I wanted to to leave until I had my border on because it's going to go on these. The end block, so I wanted to make sure I get it centered.

So here are these I'm going to place. On my Book spines and I already have my fusible web on the back and I took the paper backing off, so I'm just centering those. We'll fuse those on. And then we'll get our applique fuse down over here, and you can also wait until after it's quilted and bound to do an applique down here if you would like, if you don't want those quilting lines to go over your applique. It is totally up to you.

And I have all my seam allowances pressed toward the borders here. I don't remember if I said that. And then we're pressing I I'll give these. Another press my other. Appliques just to make sure those are good and fused.

So let me grab my applique right here. So there's my cat who's going to be sitting on his bookshelf as cats like to do, and I'm gonna take my paperbacking off. And like I said, you can do any sort of applique. The sky is the limit. You can draw your own, you can find, you know, outlines online.

And I'm just going to set. My cat so that he's kind of aligned with this bottom. And I want to make sure, keep in mind, if you're doing this before this is getting bound, we're going to have or sorry, 1/4 inch seam allowance on that side. So make sure his ear doesn't get too close to that and his tail. Doesn't get too close to the bottom.

And then I'm just going to fuse this on. When you're fusing an applique on, you know, it's an up and down motion with your iron not side to side. If you do a side to side ironing motion, it can skew your applique. And that is bad news. So we're just pressing this straight down.

With some pressure And then once all of your appliques are fused, we want to do one more double check to make sure that everything is squared up and even, and we're going to cut our batting and backing. And then we are going to get this quilted, which is another fun and creative step. I'm doing a stipple stipple stitching. But you can do whatever strikes your fancy, and that's what I love about free motion stitching is it's sort of like drawing with your thread and using the hummingbird hoop makes it even easier. So I'm going to get set up for quilting and I'll meet you back here.

So I've got my machine all set up for free motion quilting, and this hoop will work with all different types of machines. You can adjust the size. You can adjust both the height of the legs and the size of the hoop to adjust for different sizes of machines, and the instructions that come with the hummingbird hoop are really good and thorough for how to put it all together and get these 4 rails snapped together. And then when you're hooping your fabric, you've got full instructions for that, and we just have these clamps that clamp the fabric down to the rail underneath. And then I have these little elastic clips that come up and clip to this clamp, which is really helpful for if you're doing something that is wider than this and you have excess fabric at the back, you can roll it up.

And clip it, which is what I've done over here on the bottom I've got a a little bit extra so to keep that out of the way and keep it from dragging, I've rolled it up and I have my elastic hooped over and clipped and I have my wall hanging here centered on my batting and backing and I have it pinned down. And then we're just going to be able to roll this around with these ball bearing wheels onto on this mat, which is provided with the hummingbird hoop, it allows it to slide easily and gently. So to start quilting, I'm going to start by basting the raw edges down within my quilting area and each time we rehoop and we expose some more raw edges in our quilting area, we'll base those down as well. So I'm going to start down here and I'm going to bring my. Bob and thread up.

So that I can keep track of that. And I have my stitch length set so that it is a basting length stitch and because I'm using the little rebel machine, so I have my my free motion stitching sensor underneath which which senses the how fast the fabric is moving. And the length of my stitch, oops, let me make sure I have my stitch length all the way down. OK. And then Let me make sure I get my pins out of the way.

We're just stitching. And my basting stitch got a little bit far from the edge there, but I'll be able to remove any basting stitches that are visible after I have bound my edges. So I'm getting all of my raw edges stitched down. And when you are hooping your fabric, you wanna make sure your fabric is taut enough in the hoop, so that it's not loose so that we don't get. T And such So I am going around.

On these raw edges. OK, so there I am basted. Go to clip my bob and thread. And then we can start quilting. So I'm going to come back over here.

Make sure I adjust my stitch length. And I'm going to bring my bob and thread up again. And I'm starting from the edge here. And I'm just going to be able to drive this hoop around. And drive it around in any direction to get my quilting stitches.

So keeping in mind that you're going to have a 1/4 inch seam allowance at the edges. For your binding. And I'm just kind of going in a loose stipple pattern. And when I come to the edges of my apple case, my little. Salvage book titles.

I'm gonna try to capture those in my stitching. So I'm just trying to kind of stay random with my stipple. And when you're first getting started. You can mark the edges of your quiltable area. You can mark it off with.

Uh, painter's tape or something of that nature, but these clamps on the side edges of the fabric actually have markings on them that allow you to keep track of your quiltable area and where you need to stop and reboot. So I'm going to be stopping right about here. I'm going to bring this back up. And I'm going to stop right there and then when we rehoop, I'll be able to do the next section. So, I'm going to.

Cut my bottom thread. And then we'll be able to rehoop to do the next section. So there is where I've stopped, and that's where I'm going to start again, when I do the next session section. So I'm going to unclip all of these. And slide my my project over.

So I'm unclamping. And they provide a little ruler. To help you align this. When you're first getting started, but I've done enough of this, and I've done larger projects on this as well, that I'm just going to slide this over, and I have a good idea of where this needs to align. So I'm going to slide this over and when you rehoop you want a little bit of that previously quilted section to remain within your quiltable area so that you can match up where you stopped quilting to where you're going to start quilting again.

So I'm going to. Clamp this down, make sure my fabric is taut. Make sure I'm. Aligned And my project is tall and skinny, so I don't have to do any rehoopings this way, but I've done larger projects on this where you do have to rehoop both this way and then you do the next row down, and it's really easy to align where you stopped quilting to where you need to start again. And I'm using these little dotted lines on these clips to help me align.

Let me make sure. I've got everything centered and then we'll be able to start quilting again. All right, so I've got myself rehooped and I'm just rolling up the excess and then clipping that so it's out of the way and now I've exposed some more of these raw edges, so I'm just going to come down here within my quiltable area and. I'm going to baste those edges. I'm going to pump my stitch length down again.

Pull the bob and thread up. And then tack down those edges. So there's my one side, we're going to tack down these edges. Clip my bobbin thread. And then I'll show you how we align.

Our quilting, so there's the spot where I stopped. Quilting from my last area, so that's where I'm going to start again. Pull up my bobbin thread. Make sure I have my stitch length correct. And then Making sure I keep my tails out of the way and I can just clip those tails off.

And then we can just. Start our stitching again. And we're going to do the same thing when we come to the end of the closeable area for this hooping. We'll stop at the edge. Flip the bob and thread, rehoop.

And then continue for the length of the project. All right, there's my last hooping. So I've got all of my quilting finished down the length of this wall hanging, and I can just go ahead, so clip my bob and threads, I'm going to clip. Those thread tails. Then We can unhoop everything and take a look.

So I've got my stitching all the way across. I was able to just drive this hoop around. Rehooping a couple of times, I think it was 4 hoopings. And it was just so easy to clamp that on and then get my. Free motion, stitching, so everything is all quilted together in my stipple pattern.

So next I'm going to trim this up and we'll finish it with some binding. So we've got our wall hanging all quilted, I'm switched back over to sewing. I've got myself all trimmed up and squared up so you can see my my stipple stitching. All the way down the length of this wall hanging, and you can see the stitching a little bit better on the back. But it's nice and smooth thanks to the smooth motion of those those ball bearing wheels on that hummingbird hoop.

So it turns out really beautiful and then you can bind this in whatever way you want, add hangers in whatever way you want. I put these little tab hangers on the back and instructions for making those are in that download. And then for my binding, I just have my 2 inch strip that I have pressed in half and I cut that beginning at an angle and pressed. In about 1/4 inch, so that's for my beginning and then. I'm going to stitch this beginning portion down and again, 1/4 inch seam allowance.

I'm just going to tap that. Part down. And then I'm going to start stitching and a couple of inches down from that. So I leave a little bit open for finishing, for tucking that binding in at the end. So I'm going to stitch 1/4 inch seam allowance all the way around, mitering my corners.

So I'm going to stop stitching at these corners, 1/4 inch from the next edge. And that is going to help me in mitering. So I'm going to fold that. Up and then back down. And continue stitching from that fold and I'm going to do the same thing.

On all of my corners all the way around. At the end of my binding, I'm just going to trim off the excess. And tuck that in to the binding beginning. And continue stitching to finish that off. And then we're going to flip this binding around and pull that to the wrong side, and you can do it the other way too.

You can stitch your binding on to the back side and then fold it around. To the front, either way, so I'm going to fold this around and I'm going to clip, and then we're going to stitch it again from the right side, top stitching on the edge of that seam to catch that fold on the back. So I'm going to miter my corners. And fold Those corners into a nice 45. And clip this all the way around.

Now as our last step, we're just going to be edge stitching that seam, so I have my binding folded over so it is over that previous seam, so that when we topstitch on the binding that will catch the fold underneath. And create a nice clean finish. I'm gonna stop with the needle down in the corner to pivot around and do the same thing all the way around the perimeter. All right, I've finished my top stitching on my binding so it blends right into this border because I use the same wood grain fabric but there is my border so it's all finished and I have my my hanging loops up at the top here for when I want to hang that in like I said, of course you can use whatever hanging method you like, but there is our. Bookshelf wall hanging.

So if you haven't already, make sure you download the full instructions for the bookshelf wall hanging. I hope you enjoy the project and I hope you enjoyed watching me construct it and use that hummingbird hoop to make my free motion quilting fast, easy, and look great. Thanks for watching.