How To Quilt Square Borders Using Templates

The new Bluprint quilting class, Machine Quilting with Templates: Creating Design Perfection is instructed by Kimmy Brunner, and will open up a whole new world of design possibilities for you. After you take the class, you’ll not only be able to make complex designs, but they will be neater than ever. It’s all thanks to templates; and Kimmy will show you exactly how to use them with your sewing machine. In fact, she’ll start even before you take the class: check out this free video tip, where Kimmy shows you how to make hanging square borders (a classic, and versatile design). Warning: you may shocked at how simple it is to make such precise squares! Check out the free tip below, and get a 25% discount on Machine Quilting with Templates: Creating Design Perfection.

Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Kimmy Brunner, and I’m a quilting instructor at Bluprint.com. Today I’d like to show you a very simple, very classic border variation that works really, really well in those little stop-border spaces. This design is non-gender-specific, so it will work in a lot of different quilt applications.

What you’re going to need to accomplish this border is a straight template to help you keep your line straight, and a chalk pencil to help you sub-divide your border into equally sized shapes and squares so that you can stitch nice hanging squares. When you are marking your squares, you want to make sure your marks are stacked right on top of each other so that your squares stay square. If your marks vary a little bit, your squares are going to get stretched into parallolagrams, and it’s not going to be a very successful finish. So stack your marks one on top of the other, all the way across the length of the border. And then you just basically stitch from dot to dot. It’s easy as that. Let me show you how.

I’ve already stitched coming up the sides of my borders, so I’m just going to connect what I’m stitching now with what I stitched previously. Let me get my line started here. I’m going to lay down my straight ruler, and I’m going to stitch from the line that I stitched previously, right up to my first mark. I’m going to stop with my needle down, pivot my ruler, and I’m just going to start stitching my zig-zag pattern for my first stitching pass. Up to down. Down to up. And up to down. Let me get my pen out of the way, so I don’t run that over. And when I get to the other end, I’m just going to connect this stitching line with the line I stitched previously. I will break my stitching line, and I’m just going to return back to the other end where I started. And I will stitch a second zig-zagging line, which will complete my square shapes. Let me show you simple that is.

I’m going to start in this corner. Going to stitch down to the corner, which is where my stitching line from my previous row of stitching ended. Stitch down. Finish off that line. Pivot my ruler, and take off again, doing a zig-zag stitching line. And I will end in the opposite corner, just like where I started on the other corner. And as you can see, my second set of zig-zag lines finishes my squares, and I end up with a nicely stitched border of zig-zaggy little squares, all the way across my border. I hope you found this useful, and I hope you’ll try it on one of your own quilts.

If you’d like to learn more about quilting with templates, please join me for my Bluprint.com class. It’s called Machine Quilting with Templates: Creating Design Perfection. I’m Kimmy Brunner. Happy Quilting!