Tip Tuesday! An Easy Sashing Technique

"Tip Tuesday!" - An Easy Sashing Technique

I love learning new things and then sharing that knowledge with my quilting friends. So, every Tuesday I'll provide some tips, hints, tricks, tutorials, shortcuts, etc. that I've learned over the years and share them here on the blog. 

"Tip Tuesday" will be a collection of information about a wide variety of subjects garnered from a large variety of sources.  I am not an expert by any means and do not take credit for being the great wizard behind all of these hints and tips. I will gladly give due credit whenever possible.

These tips will be archived and accessible to you just by clicking on the "Tip Tuesday" tab above. 

Read, enjoy, and be inspired!

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Avery's Turtle Quilt

(Yep, I just loved this picture and wanted to post it again!)

Although I find that I don't do it often, I like the look of sashing in a quilt. (Quite honestly I didn't realize that I don't do it often, but when I was looking for pictures I didn't find many.)

Adding sashing to a quilt separates the blocks and sort of spotlights them. Once I added the brown and beige frames to the turtle blocks in Avery's quilt above, the blocks were pretty big. I didn't want to sew the blocks side by side because that would be boring, but I also didn't want the overall size of the quilt to be too big. I added a narrow sashing and included brown cornerstones that were made from the same fabric as the first frame around the turtle blocks and I think it worked. (Please ignore the weird looking corners on the quilt picture below. The binding is sewn on by machine and not hand stitched to the back, thus looking like I have odd corners.) 
  

In this gorgeous star quilt made by Chris, the sashing and cornerstones are more proportional to the overall quilt size and the cornerstones pull all the scrappy blocks together beautifully. I LOVE this quilt! 

Sashings and cornerstones can be basic (one sashing fabric and one cornerstone fabric) or they can be more complicated and pieced. In the quilt below, the sashing is just a single strip of fabric, but the cornerstones are pieced mini four patch blocks.

Here's a close up.

When I made this quilt, I made the sashing the only way I knew how. Piece the blocks, sew a sashing strip to the right side of the blocks, and then sew the blocks into rows. Next, sew the horizontal sashing strips to cornerstones and then sew the long strips to the previously sewn rows. It always helps to say a prayer and hold your tongue just the right way so that everything matches up just right!  :-)

Especially early on in my quilting life, that matching up part was tricky and I often wasn't thrilled with the outcome. Perhaps that's why I didn't make too many quilts that required sashing. I think I preferred to make more blocks or add extra borders to make the quilt the desired size. 

Then I went to a guild retreat and everything changed. Karen introduced me to a new way of adding sashings and cornerstones to quilts and I fell in love! (I know that many of you probably already know about this, but it was new to me and I thought it was the next best thing to sliced bread.)

Using this technique, the sashing pieces and cornerstones are sewn to the blocks and then the blocks are sewn together. You no longer have to sew long sashing pieces and hope that they match up. For me, it is much easier and I get better results.

Avery's turtle quilt was sewn that way, as was this quilt.

And this quilt, with pieced sashing and cornerstones, was much easier for me using the technique.

I was explaining the technique to my sister Ann last week and she found the following link that does a great job of demonstrating it. 

http://www.synthcom.com/~val/Quilts/Tutorials/AddingSashing.html

The only thing that is not mentioned here is the pressing. I press to the sashing whenever possible, especially if the cornerstones are pieced. Other than that, this is a wonderful tutorial from Val's Quilting Page.

I hope you'll remember this technique the next time you're going to sash your quilt. 

Enjoy!