Burying your quilt thread
Robbi Joy Eklow, who is an amazing quilter, shared a fantastic way of burying her quilt threads. It’s faster than what I was doing — well, I should say that I’m told it’s much faster than what I’m doing when I bury tail. K. Grace Howes posted a video of this methoc on YouTube, which I’m sharing here. Grace gives more insight here.
February 23rd, 2010 at 12:08 pm
clever. but still too much work! I just let the thread tails hang, and call it art!
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:02 pm
I agree with Jane! when I do this I don’t bother with the loop, I just thread the tails through a needle, pull through and clip the ends.
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:13 pm
While the vast majority of times when I’m machine quilting I can over-stitch, or stitch off the quilt itself, I recently finished a piece that had some straight lines with a dead stop. Over-stitching didn’t work because it was too obvious. I ended up leaving tails, pulling them to the back, tying them off, and then popping the knotted thread back into the quilt. Robbi tells me that when using her method, you can develop a rhythm and it goes very fast. I’m going to try it to see it’s the case. The bigger issue for me is my disbelief that I have to where reading glasses to see the darn needle hole. I don’t mind being 50, but I sure would like my 20-10 eyesight back!
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Thank you so much! I love this method too!
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Thanks Gloria for featuring my video.
But you are right about the needle hole…..I usually have a needle already threaded by my machine but because I wanted to show me threading the needle there were many takes that ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor cause my eyes and hand would just not cooperate.
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Grace, oh I hear you about the hand/eye thing! It took me months to realize I needed my eye checked. No kidding. I kept thinking I had defective needles. AND I bought more needles and was annoyed because they were defective. I thought the holes were closed. Geesh, I can be thick!
February 23rd, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I use Robbie’s method and love it. No tacky over stitching, no trouble with thread tails that are too short to go through a needle’s eye, no pulling the threads to the front or back. I tried a lot of other methods and each was messy in its own way. One thing I find helpful is to use slightly heavier thread of a contrasting color for the carrier thread.
February 23rd, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Ooh .. I like that idea of the heavier, contrasting thread. Thanks!
February 24th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Wow! I want to go quilt something so I can try this method out. Seems like it will be much faster than treaded each set of individual tails into the needle.
Thanks!
February 24th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Robbi has some amazing tricks up her sleeve, and it’s very cool that Grace took the time to video it and post to YouTube where everyone can watch and pass around. :)
February 25th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Why not use a “handicap needle” to essentially do the same thing? I thread the offending ends, even tiny, short ones into the end of the handicap needle and zip them down into the quilt, so much faster than any other way. Try it, you’ll like it!
February 25th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Margorie, Is that a self-threading needle? If so, I’ve tried it and always break the threads when pressing them down. Or are you talking about something else?
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:00 am
Brilliant! Thanks for sharing this.