Steam a seam2 trick and hanging sleeve trick

Have you ever tried the steam a seam tape by the warm company to attach binding??

Lori (Editor of  McCall’s and Love of Quilting magazines) showed this trick on FB and I saw it on the quilt show recently too.

I did try this for a quilt from the house hop and it worked ok, but I found out I actually did it backwards…

Now I’ve tried it a few times since and it works great!

So I attached the winding to the front by machine the normal way (my seam allowance it a tad over 1/4” which is a certain spot on my walking foot) Then I attach the seam tape onto the back

I used a hot iron to set it first

then gently rip off the paper

Then I careful fold over the binding to the back and iron it with a hot iron, the edge goes over the stitch line a bit (might work if you line it up too- I’m still fiddling with the perfect “spot) you continue all the way around and fold the corners.

then from the front I stitched down close to the folded binding edge, so again close to 1/4”

Now another trick is one I learned about from a fellow Island Batik ambassador about the hanging sleeve.

I always stitch the top on as part of the binding, but then usually I hand stitched it down until I saw this trick!

It’s call a blind stem stitch and you have to use the blind hem foot that comes with your machine (it’s a standard foot for sewing a hem onto a dress or pants) Look on youtube for videos for this as it seems a bit odd, but once you get it, it’s like a lightbulb moment!

Around the loose edge of where the hanging sleeve ends, you fold the top right side under the quilt, so that “seam” is to the right.

So on the left I have two layers of the quilt and the hanging sleeve is just peeking out a bit from underneath, it had to peek out a bit and NOT line up, then start sewing the blind hem stitch, the foot has a straight piece that lines up with the fold of the quilt and then it does a fun kind of zig zag and straight stitch combo and it grabs just a tiny bit of the quilt on the left but mostly stitches forward (see below)

The stitches look like this, so the straight stitching is on the hanging sleeve bit that was peeking out, then the zig zag goes left a tiny bit onto the quilt

When you lay the quilt flat again, the hanging sleeve is flat and there’s NOT stitches on the front at all because the quilt is so thick, you were really only sewing into a few threads of the backing, maybe a bit in the batting too but no where near the front!

I can’t show the front of the quilt yet, but will soon enough

Yesterday we had some sad news

Our four chickens were killed inside the run (I found a hole in the fence afterwards)

Sonja was really sad about it, I was too of course, but this is the 3rd batch of chickens we’ve been thru, don’t think we’ll start over…

so RIP Cheddar, Kimchi, Smoke and Trump.

We’re also preparing for the first snow of the season, they are predicting 1-3” Saturday night, then 8-12” Sunday! so the kids are excited and guessing no school Monday and Tuesday.