Quilting with Painter’s Tape

Bento Box Quilted, originally uploaded by Indie House.

Quilting is done! I decided to take photos of each step of the quilting process for you. I always wonder when I see a finished quilt how they did it. Was it done by hand or machine, on a standard home machine or on a long arm?

This is the first quilt I’ve completed on my Janome and since it’s a 64 in by 64 in square it was quite the beast to finish!

In quilting you always want to start at the center and work out. I really like using painter’s tape as a stitch guide. I’m a little bit color blind so I have a hard time seeing and following most quilt markers. Painter’s tape is pretty impossible to miss and it comes in a variety of widths. You can also purchase special quilter’s tape that comes in widths as small as a 1/4in but it’s about twice as expensive considering you get half as much in a single package. Since painter’s tape is low tack you shouldn’t have any trouble with it damaging your fabric or seams but you should still be careful when removing it. I only tape the part of the quilt I’m working on. I find as you continue to move the quilt around the tape can start to peel up at the edges, the longer it’s on the more of a problem this can become. The tape can only be reused once, after that it becomes more of a hassle then it’s worth.

So I started with this

I followed along the inside of the outer pieces and the outside of the inner to create two sets of line in each part of the design.

You can see what I mean in this picture.

I moved out from the middle to the edges on the top, bottom, and sides.

In this design some of the tape remains from the previous sections, in your excitement to reveal your quilting keep this in mind.

In the small boxes I only quilted one set of lines, following the inner edge.

Still moving out from the middle

And the last set!

And some close ups of the individual blocks.

I’m hoping to square it up and bind it this weekend, so I can donate it to a local church.

Oh here is the back, you can’t really see the quilting on the green.