How to Sew a Quilt Together

Video Transcript

"JEANETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeanette White on behalf of Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts. And today, we're putting together a basic 16-patch. Now, this again, as we've said before, could be a 4-patch or a 9-patch or a 25-patch or so on. The possibilities are endless. I cut my strips. I stitched them together, and then I cut them in the same increment that I had when I cut my strips. So my strips were 2-1/2 inches wide, and then when I cut the four-strip zone together I cut those in 2-1/2 inch increments. Now, I'm going to put them together, alternating color, and we'll end up with this block. The trick here is that we need to sew so that this seam right here is not interrupted. And we have seam allowances that are what is called butted. And that means that we've got to control the bulk by having one seam allowance go one direction and the other one go another direction. And you can see it very clearly here, I believe, where this seam allowance underneath is pointing toward me and this seam allowance on top is pointing away, and that is called butting and makes it so that this lay is nice and flat. How we're going to accomplish stitching this? First of all, pinning it then stitching it, is I'm going to lay the two row edges together, but I've overlapped it too much. You can see here, this one is too far this way. So what I'm--and I did that on purpose. What I'm going to do is put my two row edges together right here, get a little traction in your fingers, and then you're going to slide that and as you slide it, you're going to feel it. It's very easy to feel that. The minute you feel that, you're going to put a pin just to the left of the seam line right here. Go to your machine and hopefully, you're doing this in string piecing. So you'll be pinning a whole bunch of these and then you'll be going to your machine and stitching a whole bunch of them because if you stitch one at a time, we'd like you to get done in this century so you can move on to your next project. And you will if you do this assembly line, which is just kind of the same thing as string piecing, but it's just where you feed one right in behind the other. So now, I've stitched this one and you open it up and you can see this is uninterrupted. Then I would stitch these two and sew this pair to this pair, and I'm done."