Getting Started Series - Squaring Up Your Fabric

When I was in Middle School...sometime in the dark ages...every girl had Home Ec classes, both sewing and cooking. In those days our sewing projects were garments.   When constructing a garment we had to be very mindful of placing our pattern on the straight of grain. If you didn't, your garment would not hang straight on your body. (My childhood friends on Facebook and I still talk about that Home Ec teacher...she was a doozie! She tortured us with darts, zippers and set-in sleeves! These were my earliest dates with Jack...Jack the ripper.)

 
With quilting, we don't pay a lot of attention to the straight of grain (or the weft and the warp), but we are very mindful of the "square" of the fabric.  If your fabric isn't square, your blocks will be wonky (that is a quilting term meaning misshapen.) When you purchase a piece of fabric, you watch the sales person cut it off the bolt and it looks perfectly fine.  It isn't.  It is not "square" regardless of how straight everything looks.

A little rabbit trail here... Click HERE for a interesting video on how fabric is made. And then Click HERE for another short video on how it is wound on the bolt we see in the fabric store. It actually makes sense to me now why fabric isn't perfectly square on the bolt and why it is not perfectly square when it is cut.

There is nothing magical about this.  I don't have any "sure fire way" or words of wisdom about squaring up your fabric.  Instead, let's turn to the internet.  The Internet is a wonderful place to find EVERYTHING. (Recently I heard an interview with Luis Perez, an AAF football player, who said he learned to be a quarterback on YouTube!)  Well, I found two helpful internet sites, one a video (on YouTube) and one a  printed step-by-step tutorial on Blueprint (formerly Craftsy), where we will learn to square our fabric.

Here is the YouTube video.  It is quite good, but, she doesn't show you how to cut your fabric after squaring up. Here is the step-by-step tutorial on Blueprint. This tutorial fabric shows you step-by-step how to square up the fabric and also shows you how to cut the fabric.  (A note on the step-by-step; when working with yardage, don't unfold the entire piece and try to square it up....start at the end, leaving the remainder of the yardage folded.  You will need to continue to square up as you use up the yardage.)

OK, that's it for this Getting Started session.  And, if you decide to take up football, remember you can learn to be a quarterback on YouTube!
 

Getting Started Series: A Few Words about Thread

There is really only one rule about thread....don't buy cheap stuff.  That is pretty much it.
The five-spools-for-a-dollar you sometimes find...  Leave them where you found them.

There is a lot of good thread on the market.  Personally I like Aurifil.  It is an Italian thread.  The main reason I like it is less lint in my sewing machine (and because my Quilting Auntie told me to use nothing but Aurifil.  I always do what I'm told.)

I found a very good article on choosing the right thread for any sewing project from sewing bathing suits to quilt piecing:
Click HERE.

Good thread will cost more, but it's worth it.  I buy mine right off Amazon; $10 a spool. (And, believe me, these spools last a L-O-N-G time.)

I have a drawer full of thread, but I tend to quilt piece with only a few colors: a very light blue, # 2600;  a beige, # 2000 and occasionally a medium gray # 2605.

My Bowl-O-Thread