The Art of Hand Sewing

We’re lucky to live in an age with incredible sewing machines that make quilting fast and efficient. But in a world driven by speed, there’s something uniquely satisfying about slowing down with hand sewing. Portable, precise, and meditative, hand sewing allows you to enjoy quilting in a more mindful way while adding detail and personality to your projects. The beauty of hand sewing is that it’s portable. Whether you want to take a project on holiday or a road trip, or you have a long commute and you want to pass the time productively, or you just want to spend more time on the sofa with your loved ones instead of in your sewing room, hand sewing offers this flexibility.

As quilters, we’re lucky to have plenty of options of ways to inject that bespoke look of hand work into our projects. These are the main techniques that are stitched by hand:

Using precise cardboard templates that fit together into complex patterns, English paper piecing is a precision technique that can yield stunning results. The beauty of EPP is that with clever fabric placement and fussy cutting, you can create the most incredible patterns in your piecing.

Similar to EPP, hand piecing involves sewing together precisely marked and cut pieces of fabric, but without the paper templates. This means it can be a bit quicker than EPP. It’s a portable alternative to machine pieced patchwork, and because of the precision in hand piecing, it’s a great way to sew curves and interesting shapedpieces that are more challenging by machine.

Darling Basket by Nic Vaughan in Issue 50

There are many ways to applique, and the most traditional is needle turn applique, which involves stitching the applique element to a background fabric by hand, with asmall hem. You can also use raw edge applique, applied with a fusible interfacing and stitched down by hand with blanket stitch.

Not just something for nanna’s doilies, embroidery is a wayto add extra detail to quilt blocks and projects. There are plenty of amazing embroidery patterns and styles out there that can make beautiful additions to a quilted piece, or can become projects of their own.

While machine quilting is fast and fabulous, there is something satisfying and extra-snuggly about a handquilted quilt. While the traditional goal is tiny, almost invisible quilting stitches, many modern quilters like big stitches with chunkier thread like embroidery thread or perle cotton, and the quilting becomes a feature.

When Stars Go Blue by Julie Ryan in Issue 10

And remember, it’s not an either/or choice. You can mix machine work with hand sewing for the best of both worlds. Try piecing intricate blocks by hand, then assembling the quilt top by machine. Or add hand quilted stitches as accents to a machine-quilted project. However you combine them, hand sewing is a relaxing, creative process that brings new depth to your quilting.

This is an edited excerpt from Jane Kelly’s original piece Hand Sewing. Read the full article in Make Modern Issue #59.

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