Quick quilting tip

I was surprised to find recently that not everyone uses tape on their quilts! I thought it was a pretty common practice when quilting long, straight lines…lines that you want wider than the width of your presser foot, that is! I would never even consider marking lines to do this. Here’s what I did on my latest project.

Using 1″ wide painter’s tape, I just laid a strip of it across the quilt. I crossed it with another piece of tape in several areas.

Simply sew along each side of the tape. Peel and re-use the tape as long as it will stick and you can quickly sew line after line of the same width without marking anything. The second line of sewing here is the width of my presser foot and I surely did not want to do that many skinny lines!

I mostly just sew through intersections, but you can use the tape to show corners and create all kinds of geometric goodness! And here’s another cool thing—-tape comes in lots of different widths! Lots of room to play there!

I do prefer painter’s tape to regular masking tape. I’ve never had any sticky residue from it and I have had gunky masking tape just from it being a little bit old.

If you haven’t used tape, try it. If you use it all the time, don’t you agree that it’s the absolute easiest way to cover a quilt with straight line quilting?