Quilt Points

Most quilt designs at some point or another have a point in them. One of the most common points that are in a lot of quilt designs are flying geese. So this is what a little flying geese unit looks like. And you spend all this time making a flying geese, whether you do it with a rectangle and two squares, you have another flying geese construction method but you have all these really nice points that are at the top of your flying geese. When you put your units together, whether it is a flying geese unit or it's another unit that has a point, you really want to preserve those points or keep them and make sure that when you stitch them together, you're not losing them, meaning you're over stitching and then the point is gone or you're under stitching and you see excess fabric beyond it. So I'm gonna give you a sort of a quick tip on how I use usually line up my points when I have to be stitching them together. So say I wanna put these two pieces together here, so I have one point coming in one way, one point coming in the other way, and I wanna make sure that I stitch right on these points when I'm putting these pieces together. So to do that, I'm gonna flip one over. On the wrong side here, you have your stitching lines. So I have one stitching line coming up this way, I have one stitching line coming up this way, and they essentially make an X as they're coming across. So I always say that that X marks the spot. That is where I wanna put a pin right through that X. So let me pick it back up, put a straight pin right through that X. Now, I'm gonna peek on the right side. So it might be hard for you to see my little pin but because I put it through the X on the back, on the front, it's gonna come out right at the tip of that point. Now I'm going to take this pin that's holding one of my flying geese units and I'm gonna put it right down onto my other one, and then I'm gonna put this tip of the pin right through the point of my other unit. So I'm gonna lay it right down, and it's now right through that point. Now I wanna keep this pin upright so it is perpendicular to my cutting mat and I'm gonna leave it sitting upright and I'm gonna push my fabric down so now it's laying right sides together. I'm gonna leave this pin standing upright, like so, and then put additional pins in to hold it before I stitch it. One thing I don't wanna do is, right now, my points are perfectly lined up, if I were to take this pin and try and rock it to the side to actually put it through and pin my layers together, as I pull it to the right, it is going to pull my upper fabric to the right and push my lower fabric to the left. So those points that I just lined up are no longer gonna be lined up. So I wanna leave this one sticking straight up out of my fabric. Then I can go ahead and bring in additional pins and just put them right on either side of my point, like so. Now I can remove this, and now I know if I stitch right a long, quarter of an inch away from the edge, and as long as I stitch hitting the X marks the spot on the side that I can see, because I've lined them up using my pin, I know I will hit that mark on the other side as well and they'll be perfectly lined up. So that's how you can do it if you have just two flying geese units that you need to stitch together. Now, sometimes you have a longer strip of units that have all kinds of points going one way or another and you need to stitch them together to where you can't always have maybe a point on the top that you can see through. When you are, or that you can see as you're stitching, so for example, if I'm putting these two pieces together here, obviously, I can see my little X here and my little X here, but I can't see it on this side. So I'm still gonna use my same X marks the spot theory when I am stitching through this or stitching on these pieces together. But what I'm gonna actually do is I'm gonna take and put my pieces right sides together. I'd go ahead and put a couple pins in place. And then if this is what I was stitching, when I stitch this entire seam, I'm gonna stitch with this side up because it has the most seam allowances on the top and I wanna make sure I hit both of these. But before I stitch the whole seam, I'm gonna flip it over. I'm gonna take it over to my machine and I am going to stitch two or three stitches just right through that X so that when I actually stitch this seam, now when I put it on my machine, I have a couple of those bobbin stitches on this side that I can see, that I can line up with as I stitch this together. That way, I have my X here I can go through, I have my X here, and I have my bobbin stitches here that are going to tell me where I need to stitch so I make sure and hit those points. So it's very important if you have points in your quilt designs to line them up if they're coming together using that pin, and stitch through that little X marks the spot on both sides, whichever side is up, you have to also do it on the side that's down. Stitch through both of them, and then no matter what your quilt design is, you'll always have perfect points every time.