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Sewing Machines and Other Tools for The Best Quilting Results...
SEWING MACHINES FOR BEGINNERS (and more advanced students!)
by Helen Howes NEW SERIES: PART 6 - Holding it all TogetherAn important part of sewing, as soon as the seam gets more than a few inches long, or complicated, is Holding Things Together Iím a great fan of ordinary straight dressmakers pins, actually getting quite hard to find at reasonable prices. Some of the Chinese ones seem not to have a pointy end! Here's a selection of ideas for holding one piece to another, and how these work on the machine
From the left, bent (good) and straight (cheap) safety pin; flat-headed pin of a cheap sort; regular dressmakers (extra-long, extra-fine); Clover button-top; plastic-headed long and glass-headed short pins; little bulldog clips.
Cheap pins are horrible. Not sharp, not strong, and they rust. Don't leave steel pins in cotton fabric for a long time, please. Cheap safety pins are even worse - the straight thin-metal ones are frustratingly bendy and not-sharp. On the other hand, the bent ones seem expensive, until you have used them a lot of times. Always put them away open, as it saves time next time.
Long ball-headed plastic-topped are nice for some jobs, but beware getting them under the iron, as they melt. For attaching sleeves these are great, as you can see them to remove them from the back of the quilt. Put them in across the seam line.
Short ones with small glass heads tend to be good quality, and are nice for fine fabrics like Liberty lawns and silk. The heads break, so don't crush them. The iron should not cause grief, though.
For foundation paper-piecing there is much to be said for bulldog clips - they hold the paper-backed pieces together without distortion and are easy to remove as you sew.
Now, I cannot emphasise too strongly how important it is NOT to sew over pins. More machines are destroyed by this than almost any other bad habit. You hit the pin, the needle breaks, the timing is messed-up, you might lose an eye...
I almost always set the pins along the line of the seam, like the left-hand one here. This makes it easy to open up the seam before you sew to check alignment of your blocks. If you are pinning lots of layers or over complex seam-joins, you may choose to pin at right-angles to the sewing line, as on the right.
If you are right-handed, always pin at the top edge of the work, then the pins slide nicely out with the heads towards you as you sew. Lefties should pin at the nearer edge.. As you sew, remove the pin before your needle comes too close.
For layering quilts, I use regular pins on really small work, as these are quick to remove. For anything large, and in the interest of not getting points in my thumbs, I use good bent quilters' safety pins. I have used fusible batting (not very easy for anything big) and, once only, spray adhesive. Never again! Sticky, expensive, destructive to the table, hard on the lungs..Ugh! Pins can seem hard, but I much prefer them, not least because you don't have to wash the quilt before you use it. Your mileage, as they say, may vary..
If you find the safety pins hard to close, you can buy a nice gadget. Or you can use the Teaspoon Trick
Tip the pin back as it emerges from the fabric, then catch it in the bowl of your spoon, use the leverage to close the pin. Easy on the fingernails!
And for bindings, there is much to be said for the little bulldog clips again, or binding clips..
Happy sewing!
HH
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