Quarter-Inch Seam Allowance

If you make quilts using published patterns from books or single patterns from any pattern designer, you are probably very very well aware of how important it is to maintain a quarter-inch seam allowance. And it's one of the very big questions I get hit with all the time is: "How do I improve that quarter-inch seam allowance?" My first thought is, "Well, do you have a quarter-inch piecing foot?" and they'll say "Yes, I do, but it's still not very accurate." And so, there are lots of different ways that you can use two tools together. I happen to have a quarter-inch foot on this machine right now, and then my machine also has these marks on the plate here that shows me where a quarter-inch is, too, but sometimes we need a little more help, especially if we're piecing a lot of long strips together, strip piecing. This happens to be little callus cushions. I used to use moleskin for this, but it gets harder and harder to find the sticky-back moleskin. These are just made out of some sort of cushy plastic. The very first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm going to cut a straight edge right here on two of these. So these two are ready to use whenever I want to. And these last a pretty good long time on your machine. And the reason I'm using these is because of their depth, they have about a quarter of an inch, well, maybe an eighth of an inch of depth to them, and that depth is really hard for fabric to run up over, the fabric is gonna actually run up right up next to it and I'm going to be able to keep it in a good place. So now I'm going to take this sticky thing here over to my machine, and I'm going to put my machine in the down position, or my needle in the down position. And see if there is some place on the base of my machine here, on the needleplate, that I can reference, and for this particular machine, there isn't, there's not a good reference point down here that says, you know, that's a secondary way to look at that quarter-inch. So I'm going to put my needle back up, and I'm going to put a ruler underneath here, and I'm going to position it so that I can put my needle right down on the quarter-inch line on that ruler. I'll put my foot down, too, and as soon as I've done that, I'll make sure that it's true with a straight edge on my machine, and then I'm going to set this down. So I'm going to lift this up now, just so I have room to set this down, right next to that ruler and press it in place, and I can lift my needle up. So now what I have is a ridge to run my fabric connects to when I go to piece. So let's see what kind of accuracy we get here. I've just got two strips of fabric here, and you're going to see what this actually does. You can see that my fabric is nestling right next to that cushion there, and I'm going to try to sew while standing up. Here we go, and I'm going to let that fabric run right next to that cushion, and it's going to help me keep a straight edge. Now, I may have to make adjustments. I'll look and see, but the most important thing is, what I want to look at is see that I've got this very very consistent stitch length, or stitch width here. Now, my issue is that as I look at that, I think it's kind of a wide or a chunky quarter inch, so I'm going to check that with my ruler, and yes, it is. So, I'm gonna do it one more time, and I'm going to lift this guy up. It'll re-stick several times. There we go. I'm going to do that again, but I'm gonna push it in just a little bit more, because I'd rather have a scant quarter-inch than a fat quarter-inch. So this time, I'm going to place my needle just inside my quarter-inch line. Right there, that looks good. And place this down, then I'm going to get it in there really tight against that ruler, there we go. I'm going to try that seam allowance again. And that is much better. So now, I've got my scant quarter-inch, and if you're looking here on the ruler, you'll see that blue line is the quarter-inch, the outside edge is on that line, and I had a little tiny bit of space between the edge of my fabric and that blue line, and that's a really good scant quarter-inch. The reason why a scant quarter-inch is better than a big fat quarter-inch is because when I open up my fabric, and I go to press my seam, portions of that fabric get lost here in that foldover. It's just due to the thickness or the width of the fabric itself, and I lose just a tiny little bit. If I keep losing a tiny little bit, and I sew lots of pieces together, I'm going to eventually lose up to an inch, and that's not good, that's not we're looking for. If my seam is way too big, and I do that over and over and over again, then instead of having an eight-inch wide piece of one-inch strips sewn together, I'm gonna end up with a seven and a half-inch wide piece of one-inch strips sewn together, and it's just not going to fit. So, going for that scant quarter-inch is your better bet, and using a piece of moleskin or any type of callus treatment sort of thing that has some width or height to it and a sticky back is a great thing to run your fabric next to so that you're assured a more consistent stitch-width, or seam allowance width, and that it is the right one, the one that you're looking for, a scant quarter-inch.