Kristen of Scrap Fabric Love has tried seven quilt as you go methods and keeps coming back to one. She calls it join and flip, and is careful to say she did not invent it, only that it arrived without a name. It lets a quilt grow sideways across the table instead of being rolled up and forced through the throat of the machine.
The stack is the whole trick. Two quilt top rows go right sides together, and the batting goes with them. The difference is the backing: those two pieces go right sides together as well, underneath everything else. Sew one quarter inch seam through all the layers, then open the back one way and the front the other. Both seams close themselves, and nothing is left to hand stitch shut.
She shows it three ways: rows joined before quilting, blocks quilted individually and then joined into rows, and a version a subscriber sent her where the batting is cut half an inch narrower, the seam goes through fabric only, and the batting is slid in afterward. That one answers the objection people raise first, bulk, though she has never found the four layer seam noticeable.
The Quilter's Bible comes at this from the other end. It says the quilting should stop half to three quarters of an inch short of each block edge to leave room for joining, and that the method needs extra backing and batting. Her seam removes the first worry by joining all four layers at once. On the second she goes the other way: every row takes its own strip of backing, so the backings never have to match, and the batting can be offcuts from other quilts. Hers were leftovers cut to four and a half inches.
Two things to carry away. Quilt one row densely, join it to an unquilted one, and they are no longer the same size, because dense quilting draws the fabric up. Anything heavier than straight lines means quilting the blocks first. And put a table to the left of the machine, because the quilt only grows that way and the weight has to sit somewhere other than your shoulders.
The three joining methods side by side are in our complete guide to quilt as you go.
The channel is Scrap Fabric Love, where Kristen makes scrap quilts and works through quilt as you go projects.
