Tutorials
Quilt With Us
Follow along with our team of quilters as we show off our new projects, discuss new and exciting techniques, talk about new fabric collections, and share news about the latest and greatest happenings here at Connecting Threads.
One of our in-house pattern designers, Sharla, is a whiz at machine quilting. Many of us bring our personal projects to her for quilting because she does such an amazing job at making her machine quilting look like longarm quilting.
Last year she made the Chubby Chicks quilt (which is no small quilt), and quilted the entire thing on her home machine (no longarm!)…
For our tutorial this month, Teri is back to explain how to choose the best thread for your project. I’ve included the full article below, or you can bookmark it on our tutorial page. We love hearing your feedback on these articles. What kind of thread do you use the most?
-Melissa
Read more »With so many batting choices in the market today, it’s easy to feel confused and overwhelmed about which batting to use. Teri is here to enlighten us about batting to remove those clouds of mystery! Here’s the link to the article on our tutorials page for bookmarking and reference, or read below. As usual, we want to hear your feedback too. Which batting do you use most and why?
-Melissa
Read more »During one of our department meetings, we were deciding whether or not to pick up some new needles, and that opened a huge can of worms! We discovered talking to each other that most of us didn’t know anything about needles or how to choose them, so we decided that our resident needle expert, Judy, needed to research the topic and write an article. I feel so much more enlightened on the topic and less intimidated about buying needles! Here are Judy’s articles on Hand Sewing Needles and Machine Sewing Needles on our tutorial page, or keep reading below. We loved hearing your input on our January article about pre-washing, so I’m curious to see what kinds of needles you use.
Read more »It’s the start of a new year, and in 2011 we’re going to continue our practice of posting informative articles and tutorials for quilters and sewists. While we won’t be posting a new tutorial each week like Karen did in 2010, we will definitely have at least one per month. Our staff sewist, Deborah, did some research on prewashing to kick things off. Do you prewash your fabrics? Leave a comment and let us know your experiences with prewashing…
-Melissa
Read more »Here’s our last free pincushion! A Snowman! How cute is this? The two right pincushions were made by Sue and she made the hat on the far right-unstuffed with the top partially sewn so she can put her thimble in it! Very clever Sue! There are three faces in the pattern so you can put multiple faces on one snowman. Also, you can stitch, draw or paint those cute faces. The pattern has one template for the head and it’s …
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This week I demonstrate using muslin as your base for foundation pi…. My personal favorite, Crazy Quilt blocks, work really well with the extra layer of fabric so it can hold all those heavy embellishments later. You can also use this method for strippy style quilt blocks. Both are excellent ways to use up scraps.
Paper piecing tutorial is live
– this is the meat and potatoes of this technique. It’s the
basics (including video) on how to paper piece. Also, have you wondered what the differences between all the different papers that can be used? I made a video to show you the differences, so you can decide for yourself.
Recently we had a flag kit for sale, that required quite a lot of curved piecing. We’ve had so many questions about this technique, that Sharla and I put together a quick video to demonstrate. Hope this helps!
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5.16.2011