Wednesday was our monthly Quilted Joy Clubhouse live online meeting. If you missed the livestream it’s now available to watch (or re-watch) whenever you’d like. Find it on the Quilted Joy Youtube channel!

Our main program for this month's meeting was all about how to start and stop your quilting lines. There are a couple of different ways to secure your thread tails. And you'll want to use a different technique depending on if the quilt will be a utility quilt or judged in competition. Watch the video below to see how to start and stop your stitching lines.

Scratching your head wondering what the heck this Quilted Joy Clubhouse is? Click here to learn more about it!

Two Methods to Start & Stop Your Quilting Lines

There are two main ways I like to start and stop my quilting. For most of my quilts I'll take a few simple tacking stitches. As you'll see in the video, this means I'll have some thread build up. So I'll usually hide these stitches in the binding area. When I run out of bobbin in the middle of the quilt, I don't have much of a choice and there's a bit of thread build up in the middle of the quilt. But if it's a utility quilt I'm more concerned about those threads staying in the quilt after years of use and washing.

If you want to avoid that thread build up, you'll want to try to knot and bury your tails. In the video I used self threading needles to tuck those thread tails in-between the layers of my quilt. You might also like the Sench Side Threading needles, it's the same concept as the easy threading needles but the slot for the thread is on the side of the needle instead of the top. This technique takes a lot of time and patience, especially if you have a large quilt with lots of starts and stops. For that reason, I usually only use the knot and bury method on my competition and show quilts.

Angela's Favorite Things

I am absolutely in love with Laura Heine's fabric collage quilts. I've taught her technique many times over the last few years and I'll be teaching it again here in the shop in August. Click here for more information about the fabric collage class! Laura is constantly releasing new patterns and we've added two more to our collection - Cloth the Sloth and Nola the Unicorn. Aren't they precious?

How to Quilt a Quilt

I think the most popular part of our Clubhouse meetings is the How to Quilt a Quilt. During this portion of the meeting I'll share how I quilt one of the unquilted tops shared in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse Facebook group. This month I designed for Anna's quilt, which had interesting X and cross blocks. The prints in her quilt reminded me of a flower garden, so I wanted to add some leafy and floral motifs to the quilt.

The Quilted Joy Clubhouse Live Meetings occur on the first Wednesday of every month at 1pm Eastern. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday August 3. During August's meeting I’ll showing different ways to quilt hexies! If you’d like to watch live, you can find us on Facebook in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse or subscribe to the Quilted Joy Youtube channel to be notified about our videos. Don’t worry if you can’t join us live. The videos will remain available on both Facebook and Youtube afterwards so you can watch them whenever you want!

Hope to “see” you at the next live meeting!