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Longarming Series #10
Greetings!
Are Your Seams As Secure As They Seem?

The following topic is geared towards avoiding extra charges and obtaining the best outcome for your quilting treasurers.

Seamstresses learn to back-tack to keep seams from opening. But when it comes to quilting, it takes on a whole new light. With large quilts, just the weight of the fabric can cause unsecurred seams to open as shown below.
Most everyone is impressed with longarms, like the one below.

However, the size hides something that is overlooked in many other types of quilting: tension. The quilt, batting, and backing must be taut. This adds to the pressure on seams, so please make sure you back-tack them as you piece and assemble.
What seemed to be nicely back-tacked seams may have the back-tacking completely removed by the process of nicely squaring the top, or back, so that it can be loaded onto the longarm! When a quilt with the back-tacking removed is loaded, the pressure can easily open up a seam, as shown below.
To keep this from happening on an edge, there are generally two methods that can be used for correction.

The picture below below shows the first method of sewing 1/8" to 1/4" inside the quilt all the way around.
The above method is great when there are a multitude of seams that go to the edge.

Often, there are only a few seams that go to the edge of the quilt. In those cases basically sew a small tacking stitch at each seam as shown below with the dashed lines highlighted by the circles.
We trust this has been informative.
Enjoy your blessings!
At Forever In Stitches our goal is to further the art of quilting and longarming.
 
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