Hand Quilting the Bird House Quilt

I had my first quilting bee on Saturday!  Only four of us came since the only loom we could afford was so small, 2 ft by 4 ft.  Maybe one day our church will be able to get a bigger one.  Pam, Skye, Miss Debra and I spent almost three hours sewing on the quilt.  You can tell I was there to work since I had my braids and bandana on.
Miss Debra has been hand quilting her whole life and offered to teach us.  We have to hand quilt the middle since I cannot fit the whole king size quilt in my machine.  I recorded Miss Debra while she was explaining the tools needed for hand quilting.  Miss Debra is such a fun lady and it is me talking in the background asking her questions.  I am not an expert at videography but there is still a lot of good info here.  It looks like the videos are popping up at the bottom of the blog, I'm still trying to get used to the new blogger interface.

She suggests using wax to keep your thread from getting knotted when hand sewing and of course a thimble.  I used my antique thimble from this post   http://missyscakesandaprons.blogspot.com/2012/01/antique-quilts-and-thimble.html I also used my green rubber thimble, Miss Debra used a leather thimble.  Watch the video below to hear how she uses her thimble and to see what it looks like.

Here is a picture of my thimbles, I've written a previous post about my antique thimble (the silver one with red flowers), it fits my skinny fingers with long fingernails perfect!  Those short cheap ones that come in kits never fit my fingers.  I got the rubber green one from a quilt shop and it does not work if you are trying to press a needle through heavy material but works fine for quilting.  In fact I was quilting with the green thimble under the quilt and the antique thimble over the quilt.  I kept taking them off and stabbing myself too!  LOL

Pam's stitches were so tiny and precise

Whereas my stitches were horrible!

When we met on Thursday at Miss Debra's daughter's house who also knows how to hand quilt, Skye and Joeann put me to shame with their beautiful hand stitches!  LOL

 Miss Debra says the goal is to have 20 stitches per inch but she usually does about 10?  I did maybe 3-4 per inch!  But I can only get better right?  The second video shows how to do the hand stitching.

This is a running stitch, but as you can see my stitches were too far apart and for a newbie like me, my stitches were better when I went up and down in the material.  I also found I was able to hide my knots in the batting easier when I scraped my fingernails on it while slowly pulling it up through the bottom quilt,  this is to ensure you don't have a knotty bottom quilt.

These were just some hints on hand quilting until I learn more and when I have more time to spend on a quilt I would love to hand quilt a whole quilt, but a couple of weeks is not enough time.  For the most information watch the videos from the expert herself.  Whoops, I forgot she told me to make sure ya'll knew she was not an expert!  LOL  The deadline I set for myself is February 24 when we will hopefully have our last quilting bee to sew all the buttons on the bird houses.

I found some good information here on hand quilting also:  http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2012/02/ask-bonnie.html  I think I want one of those personal looms.
Be sure to check out this great post on hand quilting and thimbles http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2012/02/its-thimbles-up-monday.html

Happy quilting ya'll!
Missy
More posts of the quilt are here:
http://missyscakesandaprons.blogspot.com/2012/01/birdhouse-quilt-progress.html
http://missyscakesandaprons.blogspot.com/2012/01/birdhouse-quilt-update-2.html
http://missyscakesandaprons.blogspot.com/2012/02/i-have-had-terrible-day-want-to-hear.html
http://missyscakesandaprons.blogspot.com/2012/02/birdhouse-quilt-update-4the-back.html
http://missyscakesandaprons.blogspot.com/2012/02/birdhouse-quilt-update-5basting.html