Loading a quilt with an irregular edge

Home

Articles

How-To

Articles

Written by Gayle McKay

Have you wondered how to load a quilt when it doesn’t have straight borders or edges? It is done easily, it just takes a little bit of time and care.

Here is a quilt that I finished last week. The border is uneven, since it is made of hexagons. I have taken pictures of how to do it. You would use the same principles with a round quilt, a Double Wedding Ring (DWR) or any other irregular border.

To attach the bottom edge of the quilt to your leader, first decide where you can make a straight line. For this quilt, it is obvious from the piecing where you would. For a round quilt, you need to chalk a line, or press one with your iron. A straight line can be found in a DWR quilt by going through the melon pieces.

Irregular edge quilt 1

Pin that straight line to the leader, leaving the excess edge piece flop freely.

Irregular edge quilt 2

Roll the quilt top up on the bar, until you have just enough to reach to the starting point (top) of your quilt back.

I like to stitch a horizontal straight line with my channel locks through the batting and backing. Then I pin the outermost part of my piecing to the stitched line, and baste the quilt top in place. Sometimes I baste across a straight line, then go back and baste the outer edge. For me, it depends on how wonky or flat the quilt is to begin with.

Irregular edge quilt 3

If you have any questions, please visit the forum here to ask questions or discuss this topic.

Featured Quilt

Shirley Bruner

Quilt Blog Ads

Click Here for More Information about Quilt Blog Ads

Recent How-To Article

The "P" word

Our world is full of people wanting shortcuts. We want to have everything and we don't want to wait -- we want what we want and we want it right now. The situation with the US financial system is certainly indicative of that...but I'm not here to talk about such an unpleasant topic!!

As quilters we are no different -- we want to produce beautiful quilting and we want to do it yesterday. Now, I'll grant you that there are some prodigies in the machine quilting world, but those prodigies are pretty few and far between. The rest of us have to work at our craft, and what may look effortless is actually the result of many long years of hard work.

Practice might be spelled with 8 letters, but I'm sure many people consider it a "4-letter" word -- one that you'd rather not hear in your house and try to use as little as possible. I'm here to tell you, though, that this particular "P" word and several of its friends are not as horrible as you might think, and I'd like to give you some tips and ideas about how to effectively practice.