Quilt Sleeve

Notice no computer on the computer desk, although my father’s painting of a valley in Utah is still there.  I’m computer-dependent.  I like the web–it’s my friend and occasionally my enemy (Time-Sucking Enemy) but I like reading everyone’s blogs and getting new ideas.  And I love reading newspapers online, even though we subscribe to two already. (I’m doing my part for print media, trust me.)  This morning all I saw was the spinning ball of death (I have a Mac).  So, since I was computerless today, I worked on getting a very old quilt finished.

I began it in February of 2005 and the quilt is appliqued, pieced and I had already quilted it.  HAND-quilted it. Here we are in June 2011.  Time flies.  First up–the quilt sleeve.  I hope to enter this in a local show, and they require a 4″ quilt sleeve.  There are many fancy ways to do this but here’s mine:

Cut a single strip of fabric the width of the top of your quilt, minus 2 inches.  For a 4″ sleeve, it should be 9″ wide.

I usually try to do this on the length of grain, but if you are doing cross-grain, and need extra width, it’s okay to piece this.  If your quilt is more than 70″ wide, some people like to make it in two parts just in case the want to put a hook in the middle to help hold up the rod and support the weight.  But I rarely hang that size of quilt so I’ve never done it.

Fold in the short ends and stitch down.  Then fold it lengthwise in half and align the raw edges with the top edge of your quilt.  Pin.

Stitch on the binding.

That brings us here.  The binding is stitched on, the corners folded into their miters and pinned down.  I used to use straight pins to pin down ALL the binding, then went to the clippie-thing.  My quilty friend Tracy convinced me to only do the corners and let the rest be.  So this is how I do it now–it’s much easier not having to fight all that equipment, and yes, the binding gets on straight, thank you very much.  Here’s the souped-up version of the above picture:

See how much work I’m getting done since I can’t surf the web?

Now, pin down the folded edge of the sleeve, placing pins 1/2″ away from the edge.  When you sew down that sleeve, LIFT UP the folded edge, and stitch 1/4″ from the fold on the lower (closest to the quilt) part of the sleeve, catching only one layer of the fabric.  You are tacking this into place.  You don’t want to sew more than this, otherwise the sleeve will be visible above the binding.

All sewn.

Spool of Thread in her undercover work posing as a Quilt Rod.

 But by doing it this way, you leave a little slack in the sleeve tube, so that the quilt show rods won’t distort your quilt from the front.

My version of a label is in the next post, as I have to go and stitch this all down while I watch Foyle’s War (we’re on Season Five) with my husband.

UPDATE!

The computer came home!
It was a faulty partition in the skizzy-dingbat area of the software, which only cost me $85 and the computer guy shared with me that the hard drive could go at any moment.
Or not.