[bright music]
- Welcome, I'm Bill Kerr from Modern Quilt Studio.
My wife Weeks Ringle and I have been making quilts together
for 20, actually over 20 years now.
And we also do YouTube videos,
publish Modern Quilts Illustrated , design fabric,
and get to teach people like you,
which is such a pleasure.
Today, what I wanted to do was talk a little bit
about finishing touches.
And by this, I mean little details like quilting,
how you do it, the color you do it with,
the pattern you use, and also binding.
Because usually when you start a quilt,
you usually begin with a big idea.
You have a reason you're making this quilt.
Maybe it's your best friend's birthday coming up,
or your nephew is going off to college
and you want to make a quilt in special colors
with a pattern you love, and you think
about those big, big decisions right away.
But a lot of times people don't think all the way through,
things like how they're going to quilt it,
how they're going to bind it, until the very end.
So I kind of look at quilting as,
almost like a movie director.
You've got a movie you want to make,
and you want every bit of it to, you know,
work together to make a great film.
So you're the director and you want
even the supporting roles to win Oscars.
So you want your quilting to be, you know,
the best supporting actor.
You want the binding to be the best supporting actor.
And so by thinking about those details in advance,
or sometimes just at the end, you know, that's okay too,
you can create a quilt that is just as fun to make
as it is to look at when you're done.
So what I'd like to do is walk you through a series
of quilts, where I'll talk about the design approach
that we had in making these decisions.
And I'm going to start with the Three Cheers quilt
from our Rediscovering Your Stash publication.
When you look at this,
you can't even see the quilting, can you?
The fabrics are so many different colors.
There's a lot of movement, there's a lot of shape,
and the quilting is important in every quilt.
But the actual design of the quilting, the pattern,
is not as important in this quilt
because you just can't see it, it's really busy.
And we have kind of an approach to choosing quilting patterns.
If your design, if your fabrics are calm, simple,
there's an opportunity to see the quilting.
So if you want, you can go all out with your quilting.
If the fabrics or the piecing are really complex,
it might be a lot harder to see.
So you have to ask yourself, you know,
"Do I want to put my time into elaborate quilting there?"
And also like, "This is supposed to be fun."
And sometimes quilting elaborate quilting patterns
on busy fabrics is just hard.
You can't see what you're doing.
Our Spellbound quilt, which is a giant kaleidoscope
that is set in the deep dark teal solid
is really different.
Because in the elaborate pieced kaleidoscope,
we chose to simply stipple the quilt.
You can't really see it; the beauty of this quilt
is in the craftsmanship in matching the wedges
that create the butterfly effect of this star.
But the background is a beautiful solid,
and this solid shows off quilting
with the shadow that's created.
So if you look here in this photo,
from a distance you can see that you get the striking star,
the striking shape of the piecing.
But when you get up close,
you can see the beautiful doodle quilting
that Weeks did actually on that.
She has just a wonderful, loose way of putting on good music
and drawing lovely, lovely details with her quilting.
And that looks great on the solid,
but there would be no reason to do that
in the pieced kaleidoscope; you just wouldn't see it.
This is our Rank and File quilt.
And when you look at this overall photo of it,
you can see from a distance, you have this great ombre
from light to dark.
And as you go down the quilt,
you have over a hundred fabrics that create this gradient.
But they're all solids,
which really give you the opportunity
to show off quilting.
And with this quilting, there's a step from...
The top bands are done in a light gray,
and then it goes to medium light,
then a medium, then a medium dark, working its way down.
As you can see in this detail, the threads really respond
to the color of the quilting there.
Another quilt that is very different
in terms of the quilting would be our Accordion quilt.
This is a quilt that I always refer to as library colors.
You feel like you're in a wood-paneled room
with leather spine books and everything is calm and quiet.
And as the kind of movie director here,
this whole idea of handsome, quiet was the feel
that we wanted for the whole quilt.
So even though these are solid fabrics
that could show off quilting,
showing off doesn't mean it has to be elaborate.
What we did here was use extremely simple,
straight line quilting and kind of a camel-colored thread.
There are so many different colors in this quilt
and rather than change thread colors, which could be busy,
we just picked a very medium value camel-colored thread
that kind of disappeared and kept everything nice and calm.
When we talk about quilting,
it's not just about the quilt pattern.
There's always that issue of what thread color do you use.
And I'm sure most of you have been taught
the very useful trick of not looking at the thread color
on the spool or the cone, but to take a single strand
and lay that on top of the quilt.
Well, we go one step further.
You know, putting the strand of thread on top of the quilt
is smart because that's closer to how you'll see it.
But the reality is your thread never lies directly
on top of the quilt.
It gets stitched into it.
And depending on the kind of batting you use
and whether or not you wash your quilts.
We always wash our quilts
and we almost always use cotton batting,
which gives a really nice wrinkly texture.
That means that not only is your thread a single strand,
but it is in a valley.
So it's not on top where the light hits it,
it's deep in a furrow
where there's going to be a bit of a shadow.
And that means it's always a little darker
than you might expect.
So we tend to err on the side of choosing
a slightly lighter thread just in general.
But we always have to think about each individual quilt.
So here's an example.
Super colorful, this is our Go Big quilt
that uses a multitude of multicolored,
bright, bright fabrics that are offset
with this nice half-inch strip of white on the diagonal.
So when you quilt this,
there are lots of questions to ask yourself.
You could pick...
A lot of people might say, "Oh, it's so colorful.
"I want to pick another bright color."
Now, if I did this and did an allover pattern,
that kind of dark red-orange would kill
the kind of purity of the white.
So I could choose to leave the white unquilted,
or what we did was chose white and we quilted all over.
And a lot of people would look at this and say like,
"Oh, I don't want the white to show everywhere, you know."
The reality is a little different.
When you look at this, you barely see the quilting thread.
It gets in that little furrow and you see the texture
of the wavy lines that we've quilted,
but the white disappears on the white,
and it also amazingly disappears on the multicolored.
We have a quilt called Give Me Liberty.
And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for Liberty of London fabrics.
They're delicate, they're beautifully printed.
They're crazy expensive.
But if you're gonna use them, you've gotta show them off.
And this pattern, as you can see in this overall shot,
creates another nice general fade from the top,
where they're slightly lighter to the bottom,
where they're slightly darker.
And we made them very visible by offsetting them
with this kind of olive drab solid that prevents you
from having all the Liberty of Londons
kind of overwhelm the quilt,
and it gives each of them a nice crisp edge.
So the question with this is how do you choose to quilt it?
The Liberty of London fabrics are busy.
They're very detailed little prints, the solid is plain.
What we chose here was to pick a thread color
that was lighter than the olive
and do little kind of peacock-like feathers all over.
And what this does is on the busy Liberty of London prints,
you don't see the quilting at all
because the fabrics are so intricate.
However, on the solids, you get the peacock feather shapes
over and over, which kind of turn the solids
into almost like a print that behaves so well
and goes really, really well with the prints.
One more.
So here we have our Glyphs quilt.
And this is a quilt that uses an improvisational technique
with dozens of blocks, each of which is cut and spliced
and sewn differently.
And the idea behind this quilt is
while each block is a little gem,
when you look at them all together from a distance,
like you do in this photo here, your eye goes around the quilt
and it looks at one block, then another, then another.
It doesn't get stuck in one place.
And so we wanted to make sure that the quilting
in this case unified the entire quilt.
And once again, we often talk about texture in our quilting.
We wanted to use a quilting pattern and in this case,
we call it the Labyrinth pattern,
which is a series of kind of free hand
square and rectangular freeform square spirals.
And what it does is create a wonderful texture
across the whole quilt, without emphasizing
any one particular block without echoing any of the shapes.
It just gives a very nice overall feel.
So once again, this is where we use a quilt thread
that kind of disappeared in this mushroom background color.
And because we knew there would be a lot of texture,
we picked a really neutral medium
that wouldn't steal the show.
Once again, you want it to be a supporting actor.
You don't want it to steal the thunder.
Our Best of Both Worlds quilt, which uses a blend
of modern and Civil War reproduction fabrics,
was a quilt that we knew could get a lot of use
as a throw on a sofa.
And when you know it's going to get a lot of use,
you can think of it as a utilitarian quilt
that we wanted to make sure the density of the quilting
was really good, so the quilt would hold up
with lots of washings because we never hesitate
to wash our quilts.
We're in the kind of people that are happy
to have our dog hop up on the quilt
or who knows, you're having a snack
and you spill something on it.
I just like to be able to use quilts.
So in the case of a quilt that's going to be a throw,
it's nice to know that it will hold up
with lots of washings.
And in this case, it's stippled.
Some people like...
I teach workshops and sometimes people bad-mouth stippling
like, "Oh, it's a cop-out."
No, it's not, if it works for you, great.
It can be very practical if you're good at it
and you don't have a lot of time and you enjoy it,
absolutely keep it in the mix.
Don't let other people's judgment
of your quilting decisions get in your way.
Another example of decisions you make
with these finishing touches that really impact the quilt
in a big way would be with our Small Change quilt.
This is hand-quilted.
If you're going to spend hours hand quilting,
you wanna see it, right?
So in this case, we have simple square forms
with little donut shapes, hand-quilted.
I don't want to spend hours, and actually I laugh
because Weeks did this [laughing] but I guarantee you,
she didn't want to spend hours and not be able to see it.
So she made a couple really smart decisions here.
She chose Quilters Dream Dream Wool batting.
It's kind of a low to medium loft
and it gives you just enough poof
to accentuate the quilting.
If you quilted really close together,
it probably wouldn't have the same effect,
but these circles have quilting that's about
between half an inch and three quarters of an inch apart.
And it gives you a really nice kind of bump
that catches the light beautifully.
And she also made a smart decision to use a beige,
kind of beigey taupe quilting thread,
that was not a color found in any of the fabrics
in the quilt.
Which meant that you could see it in one way or another
on every single square.
We're always taking turns with these projects.
I've quilted about half the quilts you've seen,
Weeks has quilted about half.
This is one that I just, I was dying to do.
And the finishing touch
is actually the entire concept here.
This quilt is a quilted pillow called Fringe Benefits.
And we had just designed
Warp and Weft Premium Yarn Dye Lines for Benartex.
And I love the feel of them, and we decided
to do a really interesting experiment.
We pinned down squares of all the different fabrics
on white, and I sewed them on with kind of a box and an X,
staying about eighth to a quarter of an inch away
from all of the edges.
So the edges were raw.
And then I quilted the white in simple straight lines,
made the pillow top, and tossed it in the machine,
letting all of the edges fray.
And it took maybe five or ten minutes to pull out
the frayed bits, but it gave this amazing...
Oh, look, see you still occasionally get a little one
that you can pull out.
But it left this great texture, very chenille-like,
and the quilting actually transformed the entire piece.
The quilting on the white was in concentric squares,
it stayed parallel to the edges.
And what that does is it kind of visually contains the center
and it provides a crisp, a crispness
that contrasts nicely with the looseness
and the softness of the fraying.
So we've talked a lot about the quilting,
how the batting affects the way you see it,
how the thread color affects it.
But now let's move to the real finishing touch,
which is binding.
And first I wanna talk about three general methods.
Many of the quilts we make,
actually I take, most of the quilts we make,
like this Tube Socks quilt that I pieced and quilted,
we finish with a all-in-one kind of one step binding.
This is done using the clover binding tool
to make a simple binding that we put on the quilt
and topstitch.
I'm an unapologetic machine user.
So I like this method, which we explain.
We have YouTube videos, if you want to check it out.
If you've never done it, don't be afraid.
It's really, it's fun, it's not hard.
And we've done two really exhaustive YouTube videos
to explain the whole process.
And so in this, what you get is a topstitched binding.
And that binding is really durable, and not only that,
I can bind a queen size quilt in about 45 minutes.
Well, we do machine bind with a topstitch method,
the majority of our quilts.
There is a time and a place for hand,
hand-finished, hand-sewn bindings.
Some people simply love the relaxation of that hand work,
but we sometimes choose it for design reasons.
This is our United States of Green quilt.
And this quilt, if you look at it, is made up
of hundreds and hundreds of thin strips of different greens.
Some of them are as thin as a quarter of an inch.
And we chose to do the hand-finished binding on this
because it's a little flatter than the machine binding.
When you topstitch the binding, it tends to wrinkle more.
And the texture of that binding
looks more like the texture of the quilt.
If you hand-finish it, it's kind of taut,
it fills up the binding more and it's a smoother look.
So that's another reason to do it.
One other difference with the hand-finished binding
and the machine topstitch binding
would have to do with shows and competitions.
If you're the competitive type, quilt judges still like
to see a hand-finished binding.
Personally, I love them both.
But that is a difference to keep in mind.
And then there's one other option.
Actually, there are several, but the one other option
that we use with some frequency is the French Pillowcase method.
This is our Billiards quilt, and you'll see
there's no binding on it at all.
And the reason again is a design decision.
This binding choice is again,
trying to be the best supporting actor.
You know, you don't want a binding
that gets in the way of the whole feel.
Take a look at this quilt from a distance,
and you can see how on the edges,
those giant triangles come to precise points
and touch the edge perfectly.
If you had a binding on it,
it would truncate those triangles
and kind of interrupt the big gesture of the geometry.
One of the reasons we like the pillowcase binding
rather than a facing binding
is we tend to use all of our quilts,
and with the pillowcase binding,
the back will look just as crisp as the front.
Whereas if you do a facing binding,
you get kind of the wide flange all the way around
that I think can be a little distracting.
But again, it's your choice, whatever works best for you.
The last thing I'd like to talk about with bindings
now that we've talked about technique,
you know, hand, machine, pillow case
is if you're doing a standard binding,
whether it's by machine or by hand,
how do you choose the fabric for it?
And there are some times, like with our Acadia quilt,
where it's this handsome blue-black
that looks black on screen.
This probably looks totally black,
but in person in the right light,
you see that it's a dark, dark blue.
If you put almost any other fabric there,
it would pop.
We wanted the binding to totally disappear here.
So we bound it in the exact same fabric.
There are other times, like in our Argyle quilt,
which here when you see it up on the wall,
you can see that there are many different
subtle shades of blues and greens.
We didn't want the binding to kind of take sides here.
We didn't want it to go towards the greens or the blues.
So we kept it a very neutral, nice gray
that played well with all of the fabrics
in the quilt.
Another approach is to have a contrasting binding,
and we use this approach in our Off the Grid quilt,
which is a series of colorful square in square blocks
set on point on a stark white field.
And we wanted a contrasting binding for two reasons here.
One, a white binding just isn't practical.
If you've ever tried it, you know how quickly
it will get dirty and that won't make the quilt look good.
And the second reason was we actually love the crisp frame
that you get here.
And if you're ever in an art museum,
you usually think that you go to look at the art.
One of the things I love to do is to look at the frames.
Because framing art has changed over the years.
There have been periods where it's been trendy
to have no frame.
There have been periods where they're,
you know, carved Rococo gilded frames,
there are periods where they're modern crisp black frames.
So it's the same with quilting.
We kind of go through periods where we like the frame,
the binding to disappear or to be very visible.
So if you're, you know,
either looking at paintings online
or you get out to a museum sometime, take a look at that.
It's kind of a fun way to kinda cross-train
for your quilting.
And here's one more example of a very visible binding.
This is our Dress Up quilt.
And this takes that beautiful brick red that's in the quilt,
and it pops it all the way around and kind of sets off
this nice light khaki color in a happy way
and keeps the same spirit of the quilt.
So the last two quilts I have to show you with the binding
have to do with going all out.
And when we made our On the Dot quilt.
This was made with our Dot Crazy fabrics
for Benartex that were a whole series of color on color,
small polka dots, large polka dots.
And we wanted them to be riot of happy color.
So we thought, "Let's carry that spirit all the way out
"to the finishing touch of the binding."
So we took all the leftover scraps, made a pieced binding,
and really used that to set off the quilt.
And when you look at this quilt in the overall photo,
you can see that you not only have all the polka dots
and the strong diagonals, but your eye goes
all the way around the quilt,
really enjoying that detail there as well.
This is our Bright Eyes Baby quilt
and research has shown that strong contrast
really stimulates brain growth in babies.
So we took full advantage of that
with the black and white stripe
and used that for a chunky, bold binding.
I mean, come on, you can't help but smile
when you look at this.
And we even used a black and white print on the back.
So with the binding, it's not only how does it look
with the front, but how does it look on the back?
All these decisions are ones that you make.
You are the director of this quilt.
You have the freedom to choose the techniques,
the colors, the thread, the batting,
and put it all together to make a beautiful quilt.
And as I said earlier, sometimes
you just have a quick weekend to put something together
for a baby shower, other times you spend months
on the details, but no matter what level
of time and detail you're putting into this,
you can take a moment to make these choices
that really make the finishing touches a wonderful part
of your completed quilt.
So it's been a pleasure talking to you.
I hope you're doing well and that you have fun finishing up
those quilts that are coming up next in your future.
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