Today there are differently patterned fabrics available at shops, but Patchwork still holds its place as an ingenious work involving fabric. It’s a serious part of quilting and also for creating tons of other sewn articles.
Important elements of Patchwork
Fabric: the foremost important thing in Patchwork is to settle on the fabric of an equivalent type – of an equivalent weight – printed or plain. Use fabrics that don’t fray much or stretch. Colour Fastness is another criterion. Simple cotton, Silk and Linen are the foremost preferred. Very thin fabric may need lining or interfacing; otherwise, the seam allowance turnings, the fraying inside etc., are going to be clearly seen outside.
Many like to do Patchwork with old clothes, old white goods etc.- the simplest recycling project ever.
Whatever fabric you employ, always pre-wash the material. (Or at least steam press together with your iron to urge the effect of pre-washing).
Tools: the opposite important thing is to possess templates and tools to draw and cut the material pieces for the embroidery patch pieces accurately, in order that all of them match to form preplanned designs. A rotary cutter and self-healing mat are often an asset in Patchwork as you’ll cut multiple layers of cloth in one go. You’ll also need a plastic ruler. Square shaped clear rulers often want to cut straight edges for your square and rectangular pieces, and a protractor often wont to mark angles exactly.
5 methods to join the patchwork fabric pieces
Reverse pieced foundation piecing for Patchwork
This method is employed to form pretty designs and motifs on a patchwork with good accuracy. The material pieces are arranged within the design you would like on the backside of the inspiration fabric. The material pieces are then joined together along the sides.
Crazy Patchwork
In this, the Patchwork is formed on top of another foundation fabric. Different sized fabric pieces (with straight edges) are kept on top of the inspiration fabric cut within the size of Patchwork you would like. A cotton lining material is employed because of the foundation.
Keep the material pieces on the inspiration fabric and join them using insertion stitches, hand embroidery stitches like feather stitch or fly stitch.
Stash and stitch method
If you’ve got a variety of cloth pieces in several colors and you would like a vivid quilt during a crazy design, this is often the tactic that you simply can use.
In this method, you narrow out big square pieces from your fabrics. Stack all of them on top of every other – all right side up. Make sure that no similar pieces are stacked together.
Keep a scale somewhat diagonally on the highest layers. You are employing a rotary cutter, a traverse of these layers employing a scale because of the edge. Now move one among the pieces down. You’ve got now shuffled the entire stack. All of the sections are paired with a special fabric piece. You’ll now stitch the material pieces together.
You can stop at now if you opt that you simply have the design you would like. If you’re not happy, continue cutting and sewing in a similar fashion till you get all jumbled up fabric pieces sewn to every other during a wild array of colours and prints.
Strip piecing
During this method, strips of materials are joined together then they’re cut apart. Afterwards, they’re joined in several sequences to make different patterns.
English paper piecing
This is a way to join together geometric shapes like diamonds, hexagons, honeycombs using paper templates. This is often done by hand stitching.
Paper templates are cut out then the fabric is cut with extra seam allowance.
The paper piece is enclosed inside the material with the seam allowance turned inside and pressed – many units like this are formed, and that they are joined by carefully hand-stitching the sides together. You’ll use a ladder stitch for this.
How to plan your Patchwork
You can design your Patchwork with the material you’ve got by joining together square-shaped, rectangular-shaped, triangle-shaped, thin strip-shaped fabric pieces in a pre planned manner or a random manner. Another very commonly used shapes are Clamshells, Diamonds, Triangles, Hexagons.
Patchwork also can be through with the assistance of templates – actually, this is often an oft used and a really accurate method of doing Patchwork. Otherwise, you can purchase them from shops.
To make the template yourself, the freezer paper template is ironed on to the material then cut out. If you’ve got an important card template or the plastic ones, they’re kept on the material and traced, seam allowances are added to the present. They’re then cut out and used.
Design your Patchwork
To plan your Patchwork planning, draw the planning you’ve got in mind on a bit of paper, then divide the block into several parts as per your plan, then they’re traced to a different paper and added seam allowances as needed – cut out these paper templates. Trace these templates on fabric. Cut these shapes from fabric then join them together to make the Patchwork of your design.
High-speed assembly methods are always welcome when joining countless fabric pieces for your wonderful design – learn these five methods in order that you’ll make beautiful Patchwork in less amount of your time.
Conclusion
These are the five effective methods of joining fabrics together. If you want to seek advice or help about the topic or anything related to embroidery digitizing, feel free to reach out to us at Migdigitizing.
