SilkTieQuilt

Hi Terry, Thank you for sharing your ideas and guidelines regarding silk ties. I have been collecting a few ties from my local red cross store with the hope of making a silk tie quilt somewhere in the future. I have added your project to my page so that I don't lose your information. As I was scanning through the main projects page your quilt immediately caught my eye. Your arrangment of colours and tones and brilliant. I think its lovely. Thank you for all your valuable information and the time it took to write it all down. A new friend in quilting Julieannabell.

To those wanting to make silk ties into quilts. A few pointers. Choose a pattern that does not require small pieces or a lot of detail. String piecing works well if you don't mind not having the seams match. If you want to have the seams match, you'll need to foundation piece. I made my own foundation from muslin, but when I do it again I'm going to choose very light weight stuff that has the blue squares printed on it. The muslin was heavy. You'll have more success if you go diagonally across your block as opposed to straight across. I drew lines on my muslin squares and did flip and sew on them. I used one of those FriXion pens that disappear when you iron it. My blocks started out 10" but I had to trim them to 9 1/2 since things shift when you sew. I used 3 colors diagonally for each block: one medium color, one lighter color, and a dark band made from the tie lining. As you can see, I alternated the light and dark. In other words, if the dark is on the left of the main stripe, I put it on the right of the center. So it went together like this: 2 strips sewn face to face onto the foundation. Flip top strip and iron open. Put dark strip next. Then put the lighter piece on the end where the medium strip is and vice versa. So it goes, as you look at the diagonal block: tiny light, dark, longer medium, longer light, dark, tiny medium. Before you work with the tie fabric, you must disassemble the ties completely then wash and iron the silk pieces. Each front of a silk tie yields between 1/5 and 1/6 yds of fabric, and the back yield about 1/8 of a yard of usually solid dark silk. I was able to make at least three diagonal strips from each tie for the center of the block and one smaller piece for the center. Getting a fourth long piece required piecing. Both front and back of ties can be used but you'll need to buy some supplementary solid silk if you do a design like mine. There's not enough dark back fabric to do all the blocks. I found out the hard way that you really need to interface the silk before you try to cut and sew it. When you take the ties apart you'll notice that they are have raw edges except for the points, but when you start to sew them into strips, they can shred or pucker. Get the lightest weigh iron-on interfacing you can find and interface every piece you plan to use before you start cutting. Then, using the foundation pieces of fabric (you'll need one for every block and a few extra for mistakes) sew your silk to the foundation. It's tempting to not use interfacing, but you'll regret it if you spend a lot of time making blocks and they all go wonky and shred on you. This was VERY time consuming, but I'm glad I did it. Wishing anyone else all the luck in the world if you also reclaim silk from ties to make a quilt. Hope my pointers help. PS: Test out your iron. You'll be amazed at how hot an iron you can use on silk, and the interfacing won't stick properly unless you get that iron pretty hot. As I said, test it out. Your iron may be hotter than mine, so be careful, but silk is a very strong natural fiber and can take a lot more heat than the books tell you.

this quilt is so beauiful, I have two boxws of neck ties now I have something ro do with them other than a dimention bow-tie qui;t.

This is real pretty, I collect neck ties and I do have teo boes of them. Yes I can do this.

This is really beautiful, Terry!