Lots of excess fabric right where the points come together
What do you do when you are asked to quilt a top that is filled with 30 blocks, each of which creates a C-cup’s worth of extra fabric? Return it to the customer undone? Quilted with lots of pleats? resew each block before quilting in order to make them lay flat? Or attack them in a brute force way with TOOLS?? We chose the latter.
Un-ironed and unevenly sewn points
The cause of the problem is the lack of ironing of the seams and intersections and well as just a general unevenness of seam construction. By the way, this is an old ‘found’ quilt, resurrected from an abandoned family truck. The fabrics are probably from the 1950’s or 1960s.
Mallet, spray starch and iron
Although we tried ironing the entire quilt top, hoping it would eventually lay flat, we had to resort to the heavy hitters of tools and techniques. Out came to rubber headed mallet, a full bottle of spray starch and the hottest iron possible. Working from the wrong side, we opened the seams, swirled the points as much as possible, beat the intersection into submission with the mallet, and starched and ironed the heck out of it on the from and back.
A lessened C-cup. Maybe now barely an AA?
All that hammering and ironing paid off! The excess fabric was tamed into submission and now the probability of introducing pleats into the quilting was lessened. We have not yet quilted the top so I can’t tell you the whole story but we know it will be easier than before we used the tools.
Update: These tools made a difference and we were able to create a really useable quilt with a minimum of lumps and bumps.
Susan
Over The Top Quilting Studio's Blog 