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Thread Saver

Robin Sruoginis

Duration: 7 mins

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Transcript

Description

Robin Sruoginis shares some ideas that can help quilters save time and frustration. Robin shows us how she organizes repetitive quilt squares for seaming and piecing. Then, learn how to make a simple thread saver out of a small piece of fabric to make sewing your quilt squares much easier and less time consuming.

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14 Responses to “Thread Saver”

Mary Ellen Wilson March 3rd, 2022

I have found with my machine if I back up my machine just a stitch or two at the very beginning, I do not get that birds nest at the beginning of my sewing. Try it. I have a Brother Innovis.
KAYE E RHODES March 3rd, 2022

Great suggestions! Thank you.
Pamela Wells March 3rd, 2022

Robin - Thank you so much for the wonderful tips! I will share it with others because they are so useful. Please share more tips or ideas :)
Mike March 3rd, 2022

This is a great idea! I was struggling with this just yesterday. Save my seam ripper some trouble. Thanks.
Joan January 25th, 2021

This method is what I was told is called "leaders & enders". Used for this and also used when you have multiple thickness and your project just slides along.
Jenny in KS January 25th, 2021

Great video Robin--very helpful tips for all sewers. Linda in TX, I LOVE my Janome too! I actually would have written everything that Linda wrote. My Mom taught me to use the thread saver many years ago, and it has been quite helpful to save thread AND to help avoid getting the 'knots' on the back of my pieces--pet peeve of mine too!
Susan January 25th, 2021

No closed captioned??? I tried to turn it on but there was no captioned. I’m deaf and don’t understand what the person saying.
Rita January 25th, 2021

I’ve seen a few quilts but still consider myself a novice. The tips here are most helpful and I will definitely be trying out my next quilt. Threadsaver a great tip but even more I loved the idea of using my ruler to move pieces to sewing table. That was always an issue for me. It was one of those, that’s so simple why didn’t I think of that!
An January 25th, 2021

I loved this video <3
Theresa January 24th, 2021

Thank you! This seems very helpful. I’m excited to try it

I would like to share a couple of things that I do in my studio. And they help me save a lot of time and frustration. One of 'em is how I organize the repetitive quilt squares that I am-- You know, you're gonna be doing a lot of seaming when you are doing piecing and one of them is how I like to put together at my cutting table, I assemble and cut and put together all of my different pieces. So say these are my blocks that I am getting ready to assemble. And I take them out and I want block one, two, three, four, et cetera. And I want this square with this square and I will line them up and this works with triangles, squares you know, scrap piecing, everything. This is now the place where I want my seam to go, as always in this one little spot right here and I will line it up on my big long ruler and I know that that seam is right at the top. Then I can take these and here again is the seam that I like to-- That I'm gonna be sewing and I put it right behind the next one and on I go and I just stack 'em all the seams facing up, so that I know that all of the seams going this way, not this way but this way, are the seams that I'm gonna be sewing when I get to my sewing machine and I can put a lot of pieces going down this long ruler. Now, the reason I use the ruler is because when I'm at my cutting table, which is separate and quite away from my sewing machine, I can then pick it up and it's very stable and I can just gently hold them and I can have a whole rack of 'em and then I go to my sewing machine and I can just start sewing, picking up from the bottom. And so, so, so. So I want to show you the second little hint that I've got and that helps to really organize things and make it easy, let's see here, for when I begin sewing. So I've got my pieces all set up, now I come to my sewing machine and one of the things that frustrates me to no end is when I put my piece in and I get to going, I get it all aligned just the way I want it. I get my feed dogs down and I start to sew and the thread comes out and I have to stop and I have to rethread. And the other thing that I don't like is when I start if I'm in a hurry and I want to get through these pieces really fast, I will start and when I begin the sewing machine it'll make that ugly little knot that's on the back of that piece. Those two things just drive me nuts. They seem to slow me down and they're kind of a pet peeve. Well, when I was showed this long time ago, I thought why didn't I think of that? This is what I call a thread saver and it is simply, a piece of fabric, that's just like a two inch square and I fold it in half, so that it is two layers because generally as I'm making a seam, there's two layers of fabric. So I like to fold it over and I have it about that wide which is the width of my presser foot and this is where I put in my little thread saver. Now, if you're not hanging on to these threads that thread likes to come out and come unthreaded which is what I do not like to have happen. So I'll put my needle down, put down my feed dogs and hang on to that thread and my machine will start sewing. Now I just come to the end of it, I don't really sew off of that piece, off of my thread saver and I'll clip my little threads, because I don't like having a billion threads that collect from all of the seams that you're going to be doing, on my floor or on everything to get caught up in my vacuum. So now I will take my first piece from my stack here that I've got and I know this is where I want my piece to be sewn and I'll just realign it if it needs it, put it in and my machine because it is all threaded up, it will just start sewing. And there we go. There's a little chatter there. And you can just pick up your next piece bring it right to the end of your piece bring it to your next piece and on and so forth. Now if you're working with a lot of different blocks and you have say 20 pieces in each block I will take a little thread saver, which is of course a different fabric than my usual or I sometimes turn it inside out so that it's, you know, I can tell, and it's like a marker. I will put it in here and just sew through that and now I have my separated my block from block so that I know when I go to my ironing board and start cutting these pieces apart that I have block per block per block and don't get my blocks mixed up. So that is a thread saver and at the end of each of my strips that I'm gonna be making, I always put in a thread saver and just stop right, just a couple of stitches, before the end of that thread saver and it's very easy to just clip your first piece and now you have a nice long piece that you can take to your ironing board. Cut these pieces apart and begin your ironing and your next set of pieces that will need to be sewn together and you can just clip them apart, do your ironing, reassemble and let's say, we take these apart, put them together. You have them pressed of course and then again, you can lay them out onto your ruler and start stacking up again and I hope this really helps you, because it has totally taken away a lot of the frustration with all of the threads and time-saver for me.

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