As a machine quilter, from time to time I see quilts with “issues” one of the most common, borders that Wave Hello! AKA borders with extra fullness. Oh come on, we’ve all done it at least once! This can be caused by the main body of the quilt being misshapen, in other words blocks that are not square or that have a little extra fullness of there own. Or the most common reason being when the main body of a quilt is stretched to “fit” a border strip that was cut way to long. now there are ways to keep this from happening, proper measuring, pinning, pressing correctly, and many more to numerous to type! I see this a lot on old antique quilts and I like to think that these quilts have been around long enough to have a issue or two. Really, who knows what kind of stories that would be told if they could talk! As there are ways to keep this from happening there are also ways to fix the issue when it does happen. The most popular is of course to remove the border from the main body, remeasure, cut it to the correct size, and resew it. However sometimes this is not a option. Like on older quilts when the fabric is beginning to become a bit fragile and you do not want to mess with it anymore than necessary or the main body is out of shape. This is very common in older quilts as the quilt makers of old did not have the gadgets we have today to keep everything nice and straight with perfect quarter inch seams. Or on modern quilts when the owner is in a rush to get the quilt finished and just don’t have time to redo the borders. When this happens I use a False Seam to fix the problem. A false seam is basically a giant pleat that, when done correctly, ends up looking like a seem in the fabric, hiding the fullness and giving you a better looking end product.
I have tried to, in the past, explain a false seam to my customers with no success. So a number of quilts ago I decided that I would take some photos of the next quilt with this fullness issue and hopefully this would help explain it. And lucky me I haven’t had a quilt with issues in months! but I’m not complaining, this is a good thing! Really!
As you can see in the first photo the fullness on the border can’t help but wave hello, it really has no other choice.
Step one, I have used my pins to make a pleat and hold it in place. This will help me in the next step when I do the quilting. the fullness at this point has stopped waving, but trust me its still friendly!
Step two, Quilting. I have quilted right over the pleat keeping mind of the pins and careful not to move the fabric that makes up the pleat. I like to use a stipple pattern when I have fullness to deal with. A stipple will help ease in the extra fullness and makes it easy to go around the pins. I used a double ribbon stipple.
Step three. Once the quilt is completely quilted & removed from the machine, take a small sewing needle and some thread (hopefully a matching color!) using tiny stitches had stitch down the edge of the pleat. If done correctly this will give you the look of a seam, hiding the fullness and completely ending the issue that this wonderful old quilt once had! The small needle will force you to take tiny stitches that hide inthe fabric.
I hope this helps some of you that look at me with a “Are you nuts?” look when I try to explain what I have done to your quilt! And remeber if you want to see a close up of the photo just click on it, you will then go to my WebShots album were all the photos are located!
Stumble It!
Very humerous post and I totally see what you are doing. You know it is a little like your grammy when you were at school, you would come back and find really neat tiny stitching and your customers mysteriously find a quilt with lovely flat borders, quilted by a kind, caring quilter. Really great post.
Thank you so much! I loved your explanation and the option of making it a “seam” is wonderful.
ell as you might have notice from another post the owner of this quilt loved the end result! So i guess i did ok with it after all!
Thanks so much for the comments!