Making Narrow Borders

When we make our quilts, we often would like to put in narrow borders or narrow strips but we find that difficult, we're afraid that our piecing won't be precise enough, and it will look a little bit off. So I wanna show you two ways to put in quarter inch strips into your quilts. Now you might wanna do this within the midst of a quilt, between pieces, between various patches, within your blocks, or you might wanna actually do this as a narrow border on your quilt. So I'm gonna show you two different techniques. Sometimes one or the other will be the way to go, and lots of times it'll simply be your choice, which one you would prefer to do.

The first one I'm gonna show you is a foundation piecing technique. Now if you're one of those folks who say, no I won't foundation piece, just stay tuned, I'll get to a method that you'll like better, but for those of us who enjoy foundation piecing, I think this method is really great. I first discovered this by reading a book called "Garden Stars" and it's by Liz Schwartz and Stephen Seifert, and they really, really, to the max use these strips. And here's an example of one of the pieces that you can produce using their method. So you can see in this particular method that they've come up with, they put a quarter inch strip, in this case black but you could use any color, quarter inch strip between every single patch in the block.

It gives a stained glass appearance, but it's a little different than the traditional stained glass techniques. When you use a traditional stained glass technique, you're sewing bias strips on top, and that has a different look. Both are great methods, but this is a way that you can actually piece it right into the quilt. Now I'm gonna show you how we can do this. We're going to just make a very very simple foundation piece block.

And so I'm going to take my narrow strip, now I've cut my strip at an inch wide. If you wanna get to a quarter inch with foundation piecing, strip cut it up at an inch gives you plenty of flexibility, makes it easy to put in. And with foundation piece and you know, you just put a couple of pins in place to keep your patch in place as you work, you don't want it to slip on you. And you just put it through the paper. And now you're ready to turn it over, and to stitch.

Now with foundation piecing, if you haven't done this before it's a method where you stitch right on the paper. What I like about foundation piecing is the precision of it, because if you can stay on the line, that might be a big gift for some of us on occasion, but if you stay on the line it's quite an easy method to do. It allows you to sew a very straight line. So we're simply going to stitch on the line. Now, once you have it stitched.

Remove your pins. And we do the trimming of our seams, with foundation piecing we trim our seams after we've stitched. It's a little bit different than going the other way. So you simply fold your paper back. If you foundation piece this is just basic foundation piecing.

If you haven't done it before though, this will give you an idea. And you wanna simply trim your seam down to a quarter of an inch. And now you're ready to press your narrow strip out. I'm going to press it out in a way. Press it out towards the other strip.

And now you're ready to add your second patch. And when you add the second patch, you'll be ready to have your narrow seam, now you just kind of want to check, be sure it's gonna cover. Looks good, looks like it's gonna work just about right for us. You're gonna just pin it just loosely so that when you go to sew it stays in place. And you're gonna go back and you're gonna stitch.

Now one thing I want you to notice as I'm stitching is. Notice that my line I've simply drawn my line, a quarter inch away from the other line. You could do this if you wanted it to be three eighths of an inch, you could draw it three eighths of an inch away, you could draw it a half inch away. So this method doesn't work just for a quarter inch. This method also could work for any other fairly narrow strips that you would like to put into your blocks.

And now you can see that we have a narrow strip that we've sewn in there. And we take our pins out. We again need to trim up our seam, trim our seam right here. We just trim it up to about a quarter of an inch. One of the nice things about foundation piecing is you don't have to be real precise when you cut out your patches, and I kind of like that, you can cut them a little bigger.

If you're gonna press your yellow piece away from your strip. And now you can see that we have set in a quarter inch strip quite straight, quite nice, works very well. So that's our first method, very very easy. I'll show you a couple of pieces that you can do with this. Here's a piece that this really takes this concept, I'd say to the extreme of putting in many many narrow strips and it gives a bit of a stained glass look, and it sort of gives each patch of your quilt, a little bit of distinction because it's set off by your quarter inches.

So if you thought this wasn't possible. It's very very easy, it's what I just showed you. It's simply being able to stitch on a few lines, and you can draw your lines as I said any width, that you would like to draw them. Now I'm gonna show you a second method, because some of you don't like to foundation piece, and the other reality is that there are going to be places within your quilts where foundation piecing is not possible. So this method is gonna show you that.

And I'll show you an example of when I say it's not possible. This particular block I wanted to have the narrow quarter inch border all the way around the center of the block. Now that couldn't be foundation pieced, so I had to come up with another way to try to get an even quarter inch all the way around. And I'm gonna show you the method that I use to do this. As you notice, I don't have a paper backing I simply have my pieces.

And I'm simply going to put my strip onto my rug. That's pretty much like what I did, but as you notice, I am not working with, I'm not working with any foundation underneath. So this will be a matter of my being able to stitch a nice quarter inch seam as I hook these together. But it's just like sewing patches together. It's what you're used to doing on your quilts.

Just use your quarter inch foot here. You wanna line it up along the edge of that, quarters we're pretty familiar with that quarter inch seam and that's all we're doing here, is our standard quarter inch seam. Keeping our edges even as we go. Let me say that this black strip, if it looks a little bit narrower than I was working with, in this case it is important that you need to cut your strip to be the size you want the finished patch plus a half inch. So this strip rather than being an inch wide, this strip is three quarters inches wide.

That gives me ability to do a quarter inch seam on each side of the strip. Gonna press that down, gonna go ahead and press it out. Now, I just now pressed it because I'm used to thinking this way, I actually pressed it the wrong way. So I'm gonna show you what I should have done, you'll see that I pressed it towards the strip, and that's the normal thing. As a quilter that's what we normally do.

In this case though you wanna not press it that way. You wanna press it the other way. So we actually wanna press it towards our red strip. So we're gonna do that over. See we get these habits and we just we forget what we're doing, don't we?

We forget that there's a different way we wanna do it sometimes. And the reason we wanna press it this way, is that when I turn this over, I'm going to be able to see my seam that I just sewed, so you can see I can see my seam. If I press it the other way, I wouldn't be able to see that when I add my next patch. So now I'm ready to add my yellow patch on. And I'm gonna place it on.

And I'm just gonna just stitch it in the seam, but I'm going to want to be sure to put my pins on the side, on the black side because that's where I can see my seam from my first round of stitching, and you're gonna see that that's going to make a difference. That's how I'm gonna be able to be sure I do it. Now, you know I could just stitch a normal quarter inch seam, but then it's likely that I might not get a perfect nice quarter inch strip. So instead of lining up with the right side of my foot like I'm used to doing, I'm going to actually line up the left edge of my pressure foot with that seam that I just sewed, and I'm gonna keep the left edge of my pressure foot on that seam as I sew. And as I do that, what you will see is that I will end up with an even distance away from that first seam.

Which means that the strip we'll have in the end will be uneven quarter inch away. You can see as I'm stitching that I am keeping that left edge right along that seam line, the first seam line that I stripped. So as you can see, we have a nice even seam there, you can see that there's a strip there. Now when you press this you can press it either way it doesn't matter, I'm just gonna press the yellow out. And when you press the yellow out, you'll see that now what you have between your red and yellow patches, is a very nice, even seam.

And it's a nice narrow seam. And it's come out very much like our other one looked. So you can this way, get a narrow seam when you can't do it on a foundation. This is especially a good way to do it if you want to add a narrow seam in your border. And here's a quilt that shows how that's been done, you can see that there's a narrow border all the way around.

If you think about framing a picture, oftentimes these days we get a double mat, and that inside mat is just a little narrow strip of color. That's kind of a nice concept to also put into our quilts. And by using this technique, you'll be able to produce that nice even narrow border. Now, I like these little narrow borders, I put them into quite a few of the things I did. So when I was asked to design a quilt using a Dr Seuss print for a special issue for kids quilts that we were producing for Quilters Newsletter, I decided I wanted some little narrow strips in there.

And I couldn't decide which way to go but in the end I did the second method that I've shown you. And that quilt has fussy cut Dr Seuss, actually Cat in the Hat, fussy cut Cat in the Hat faces, and between each one is a little narrow strip. So it kind of lets each Cat in the Hat stand out with that little tiny quarter inch strip. So don't be afraid now of narrow borders, you can do them. And you can pick either of these methods or combination of both as fits the quilt you're making.