Making Chenille:
Learn how to finish off the back of your quilt by making chenille from the unfinished seams.
Video Transcript: Page 1
ELEMENTARY (Quilt-As-You-Go) QUILT – Making Chenille (14 of 16 videos) Page 1
I’ve sewn all the squares together and I have my 9 patch, or my 9 square, quilt. I made sure to match each one of these intersections when I sewed the three rows together. Now I am ready to get started on making that fringe like you can see on this quilt- that sort of chenille that comes from cutting those unfinished seams on the back then washing it and drying it.
So, let’s look at these seams and you can see that I can easily fold this, like this. Or I could fold on this seam line. Let’s try this one. And I take up my scissors and I start cutting. Actually I started cutting here. It doesn’t matter where you go, but you are going to cut into that seam. You are going to cut almost up to the thread. When you cut these little pieces of fringe, you need to make them about a ¼ (quarter) of an inch, from here to here. Or it could be a little bit smaller an 1/8 (eighth) of an inch, but at least a ¼ (quarter) of an inch.
When I get to this intersection here, I just cut through. I think this is where I made the mistake when I was sewing with this piece. But you notice, nobody is really going to notice that that was turned sideways, because you are just going to start cutting through here.
Now, what if I make a mistake and I cut all the way through onto the stitching? Well, you are going to throw this into the washing machine. After you wash it, when it comes out, you are going to have fringe that looks like this, and you can just go back in and look for any holes that might be in these stitching lines here. Just go back in and sew over it. So if you cut through that, it is really no big deal. But you are going to need to fringe all of this.
Video Transcript: Page 2
The thing that is more difficult to fringe is when you get to these areas where you can’t really fold it because this seam is sewn down here and what I like to do is just sort of cut into that where it starts coming up and then it makes it easier to have that folded out. It sort of helps you not to cut into that stitch line, and just continue on with the fringe.
You need to fringe the whole back of this. And then after I fringe it, what I like to do is add the binding around the edge before I send it to the washing machine. I just find it makes it a little bit easier if I put that binding on if it’s done before I wash it, but it can be done later, whenever.
If you don’t want to use binding, I have a quilt here, or a little table topper, that I made not using any binding. So to do this, what I did was, I would sew a ½ (half) inch all the way around here, around this quilt. Just to make sure, once I start fringing this that it doesn’t ravel into the rest of the quilt. So I would sew all the way around, and I cut fringe around the edge and then I don’t have to use binding. Either way is fine.
