A quilt label is the only part of a quilt that says who made it, and it is the part most often skipped, usually because it feels like a new small project at the moment you wanted to be finished. The method in this National Quilters Circle tutorial takes the sewing part down to four seams and a slit.
It starts at the computer, not the machine. She types the label in a word processor, picks a decorative font for the lines that matter and a plain one for the rest, and makes the line saying who the quilt is for and the line with the maker's name larger than everything else. Then, because the printable fabric sheets are not cheap, she fills the empty part of the page with spare generic labels so the whole sheet gets used.
Two notes on the printing. Run a test on ordinary paper first, and check which way your printer takes a sheet, so the ink lands on the fabric side rather than the paper backing.
The number worth writing down is the trim. She cuts 5/8 of an inch beyond the text on all four sides, and that single measurement is doing two jobs: a quarter inch of it becomes the seam allowance and the rest stays as white margin, so three eighths of an inch of space still shows once the label is sewn.
After that it is a small framed panel. Border strips on the sides first, then top and bottom, quarter inch seams. A backing laid right sides together, everything trimmed square, then stitched all the way around with the corners clipped. And here is the part that makes it painless: rather than leaving a gap in the seam to turn it through, she cuts a slit in the backing, an inch in from each end, and turns the label out through that. No raw edges anywhere on the outside, and nothing to close by hand afterward. The slit ends up against the quilt where nobody sees it, and the label goes on with a blind stitch or a whip stitch.
If you are working toward that last step for the first time, our complete step by step guide to making a quilt covers everything up to the binding, and this is what comes after it.
The channel is National Quilters Circle, where their instructors post quilting techniques and tutorials.
