Checking your seam allowances as you sew quilt blocks together will help keep your blocks the right size and your patches will keep their intended shape.

Quilting professional Georgia Bonesteel has been a leader in quilt education for more than 30 years. She is the creator and host of “Lap Quilting with Georgia Bonesteel” which is produced by North Carolina Public Television.

The show still airs on many PBS stations throughout the United States. She also has several books to her credit, including “Easy Does it Quilts” and “Georgia Bonesteel’s Quiltmaking Legacy.”

In her years of quilting, Georgia has spoken of “speed quilting.” Quilters, always looking for shortcuts, have taken quite an interest in this technique. Knowing decimals and the true width of your fabrics is one of the most important aspects of speed quilting.

Why?

Think about this. When we quilt, we generally start off with 44 or 45 inch wide fabrics. That’s straight from the bolt. Before quilting with them, we cut off the selvages from both sides. That’s shaved some fabric off. Now we are no longer working with the same width with which we started.

Seam allowances are important, too. Don’t forget to add them into your calculation of how much fabric you will need. “Quilters understand the one quarter inch seam allowance addition.

They know that on a calculator, the decimal for that is 0.25. For a 45 degree triangle, you need to add seven-eighths. That’s 0.875 on a calculator,” she said.

Georgia explains exactly why knowing the decimal system is so important to speed quilting. Checking each segment is very important every step along the way, she explains.

“If I have six or eight sections that all have to end up being 3 1/4 inches and they have most pieces inside, I’ll check each of those to make sure they’re 3 1/4 inches before I start putting my rows together,” she said.

Having a sense of where the 1/4 inch is on your sewing machine is also helpful to quilters.

Many machines have marks along the base plate under the needle. You can use those marks to line up your pieces to insure the 1/4 inch seam allowance.

When confronted with an unusual quilt pattern with strange angles in it, Georgia recommends using gridded freezer paper. “It’s a combination of a graph pad and a template at the same time,” she explained.

“Once you design on it, code the paper properly and cut it apart, it simply irons on your fabric and then you add your 1/4 inch on all the sides,” she said. As an added benefit, the paper can be repressed up to 50 times, according to Georgia. You can use it over and over again, and share it with friends, she said.

When piecing her quilts, Georgia says she does not press the seams open. “For a quilt, I’ve always been told that if you press your seams open, it creates a vulnerable surface because then it’s just the thread that’s holding those two pieces together,” she explained.

Instead, she keeps the seams closed, which she believes makes for a stronger quilt. But she does not just let the seams do their own thing. She presses them toward the darker fabric. This serves in hiding the bulk of the seam, and controls the seams at the same time by giving them direction.

She also has a special technique she applies to the seams. She calls it the “Billings Bonus” because she learned it at a class in Billings, Montana. The technique involves not sewing seams all the way to the end – easy for hand piecers, but still doable for machine piecers as well by simply undoing the stitches at the end of the seam.

Penny Halgren
Master Quilter