Nadine of DreamWeaver’s Quilts has put together this fabulous tutorial with photos, on How to Hand Stitch Binding Invisibly. I finally get it. You can zoom in on the photos on her site to get a closer look too.

I’m working on some baby quilts to donate to NICU babies through the quilt guild. This is a perfect time to give this a try.

While you’re at Nadine’s site, check out this other great tip on Transferring Quilting Designs to Dark Fabrics. Now, why didn’t I think of that??

My name is Debbie MacLeod and I live in Island Lake, Alberta, Canada. My blog shares my quilting projects and my website showcases my quilting business. I am excited to be a guest blogger – thanks, Michele, for the opportunity!

I have been piecing quilts since 1990, have been machine quilting my own quilts since 2000, and quilting for others since 2001. My desire to machine quilt came out of not being able to hand-quilt (a skill I deeply admire), so I took a class and discovered that machine quilting was for me. I started quilting for others soon after on my Husqvarna Lily. That machine is a workhorse and has quilted close to 200 projects on it! Of course, the dynamics of quilting on a domestic sewing machine takes its toll on your back, neck and shoulders and I wanted to try a larger machine.

My chance came in 2002 when I started working at a local quilt store on their longarm, a Gamill with Statler Stitcher. I enjoyed the work but found that my creativity was just not being used with a computerized machine. I wanted to quilt my own patterns!! The answer came for me in 2005 when I purchased my HQ16. I could now be as creative as I wanted too!! I love my machine and have been quilting madly ever since.

At first, I only quilted freehand patterns – I just wanted to be free –LOL; however, it soon became apparent to me that if I was quilting for others I would need to offer pantographs – which I now do. For me, quilting is my creative expression and I often piece tops just to quilt them! Many, many times I am figuring out what I am going to quilt before I have chosen the fabrics for my next quilt!

Over the years many people have said to me, "How do you know what to quilt", "What made you chose that design – it looks great", so I thought I would write about choosing quilting designs – either for yourself as a machine quilter, or choosing designs with your longarm quilter.

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On this Valentine’s Day, I’d like to share with you a method that I have found works great for adding borders to a quilt. I used to hate adding borders to my quilt tops. I would tell myself that I didn’t need to do borders; that the top was fine without. But I knew better than that. A border can take a quilt top from great to fantastic. So I would just cut long strips of fabric and sew them onto the edges and lop off the extras. But when I would hang it up, stand back and look at it, the borders would be wavy and not square. It was very frustrating!

Since then, I have learned a method that works for me and I actually enjoy adding borders; and the more borders the better! This method determines at the beginning the length that the borders need to be to keep the quilt top square. And then it insures that the borders are sewn on correctly so they are not wavy and there is no extra fabric to cut off.

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Lynn’s written this great tutorial from on making Inked Quilting Labels. Remember: a quilt isn’t finished until it’s labelled!

Please don’t forget this very important piece. Someone, somewhere at some time in the future will be thrilled to know who made your creation, who it was for, why, and when.

I love Sharon Schamber’s glue binding video tutorial, and was very pleased to find this curved binding tutorial.

Sarah from Anyone Can Quilt wrote this amazing Machine Quilting 101 tutorial.

It’s loaded with information and photos. It includes many of the tips I wish I had known when I first started, and even some I need to try.