How to Apply Wax to a Quilt

Video Transcript

"JEANNETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeannette White on behalf of Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts in Sugarhouse. Today, we're going to be talking about waxing thread so that we can have longer lengths and we're not going to have any knotting. The first thing you want to do is get your thread and a piece of cardboard that's clean. Now, you can go to the grocery store and get any non-food item box like bathroom tissue or paper towels or whatever and cut it about 30 inches long, between 30 and 32, and about 8 inches wide. And then on this one, I just covered it with paper and I used glue stick to do that because we're going to be putting heat to this in a minute and you cannot use Scotch tape. The next thing you're going to do is get paraffin wax. Beeswax will stay on thread, but it is very dirty and it will pick up everything in the environment. Paraffin wax is much cleaner. And after I have wrapped an entire spool of thread and don't stretch it, we don't want this too tight, around this piece of cardboard, I'm then going to take my paraffin wax and I'm going to begin scrubbing it into my thread, all the way down, and be very liberal with this. Don't be stingy with it. You want to really get as much wax as you can and you're going to do this on both sides. After you've done that, you're going to take a piece of just plain white paper, lay it over the top and with your iron on hot, you're going to iron the wax into the thread. And you can see, this is coming off on to the paper and on to the sole of the iron which won't hurt it at all. When you're all done, you can wipe the sole of your iron off with paper towel. And that's how we're going to apply and set the wax into the thread. In the next segment, we're going to show how we will cut this lose and braid it."