Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Quilting Designs Without Marking

For today's project I thought I would share a really neat trick for quilting designs without marking. This works just as well for hand quilting as for machine quilting, and I've used it a number of times with great success. This totally avoids the problem of not only marking but removing your marking afterwards, which makes me very happy because sometimes removing the marking is worse than making the marks in the first place.

The main material you need for this is contact paper. For this example I didn't need to mark my contact paper, I just cut out a triangle with my rotary cutter. If you are making a design that needs to be traced you can make a template with template plastic and trace it with a pencil, or trace a design using a light box (or window!)


After making my triangle I simple peeled off the backing paper and stuck my contact paper triangle onto the quilt top where I wanted to quilt my design.



I then quilted around the edge of the triangle using my walking foot. If you are making a curved shape you can do the same thing with your quilting foot. Be careful not to stitch into your template because this can transfer the sticky adhesive to your needle.






After quilting around your shape, simply peel off the sticky template, then reuse it in the next spot. You can use each template 8 - 10 times even on flannel! I hope you enjoy this quilting tip, it's one of my favorites! (And excuse the odd coloring of the last picture, I'm not sure what happened with that one!)

2 comments:

Giovanna said...

Wonderful tip thanks!! : )

Anonymous said...

great tip & tutorial! thanks for posting!