Pressing Quilt Seams

Pressing is key to having your quilts lie flat and to making it easy to join the blocks in your quilt. If you grew up sewing in another way, perhaps doing clothing, you're probably going to be tempted to press your seams open. The difficulty of when you press your seams open is, it weakens your quilts, because the strength of your quilt is only as strong as the threads that you have between your stitching. So when we make quilts, we don't press our seams open. Instead, we press our seams in one direction.

Now, when we do this, when we press seams open, we're used to working on the backside of fabric. But with the process we use for quilt making we're actually gonna be pressing on the right side of the fabric. We began with our two blocks that we have joined, and we want to, what's called set the seam. And that's simply to press along the seam before we press it in any direction. Now we're ready to press the seam open.

We're going to press, generally speaking, towards the darker fabric. So we're going to press towards the red in this case. We're going to use our fingers to press it, and we're actually gonna hold the fabric up just a bit as we press. And we're gonna use the nose of the iron to press out into that seam. The reason we do that is to avoid getting any kind of a tuck in the seam.

If we were do it from the other side, we might end up with a tuck in the seam, and that will result in blocks that are not all the same size. So that's how we're going to press the seam. Now, when we press the seam that way, one of the advantages, we end up with what we call the ditch here. And some of you have heard of stitching in the ditch. Well, that's how we create the ditch.

The other thing is, when we press it to one side, when we get ready to join two units it makes it much easier, because we're going to, here, we're going to create a four-square block. And so we've pressed towards the red, and that means that on this side our seam goes this direction. It goes the opposite. That makes it very easy to nest our seams and you'll wanna pick it up, and you just kind of push it between your fingers, and you can feel those seams lock into each other. If the seams are pressed open, it would be very hard to line up those seams.

When we have 'em pressed that way, and then we stitch our two sets of two blocks together, when we get ready to press it open, we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna press away. And now you can see that we have a very nice, even matching of our seams. And that's because we pressed our seams in one direction so we were able to easily nest them. Now, also, as you know, I said we created that ditch, and so pressing the seams in one direction also becomes valuable when we're ready to quilt our quilt.

So here I've put together our three layers; our backing of our quilt, the batting in the center of our quilt, and our quilt top. And as you can see, there's a ditch here between the two. The red is a bit raised because we've pressed the seam that way. So it's very easy for me then to stitch into the ditch. In fact, it's so easy that even though I use black thread, it's really hard for you to see my quilting stitching in the ditch, but that's the reason you do it, because so often when we stitch in the ditch we really don't wanna see our stitching.

We simply want to hold our layers together and strengthen our quilt. As you make your quilts, press as you go. You'll be much happier with your final results. Your quilts will lay flatter and it will be easier to match those seams.