Hand quilting is filmed from above, always. The camera sits over the shoulder and watches the hand with the needle in it, the rocking, the loading of the stitches, the rhythm that everyone wants to learn. All the while, the hand that actually decides how the back of the quilt will look is underneath, out of shot, doing something almost nobody thinks to describe.
What it is doing is holding. The fingers below the quilt do not sit pressed up against the place where the needle comes through. They sit apart from it, a little way off on either side, and the span of fabric between them is kept slightly taut. Taut is the word I want, not stretched. Nothing is being pulled out of shape. The slack is only being taken out, so that the backing has nowhere to travel to.
That tension is the whole of it. When the thread is drawn through, the fabric underneath wants to gather in towards the stitch, and if slack is available it will take it. Held taut, it has none, so the stitch settles flat and the back stays as calm as the front. Let the fingers rest right against the needle instead, with loose fabric all around them, and every single stitch collects a fraction of that looseness.
Here is what I would carry into any work that goes through layers:
- The hand you cannot see governs the surface you cannot see. The upper hand is responsible for the face of the work, and it gets all the attention because it is the one on view. The lower hand is responsible for the reverse, and it is the one you are not watching. Whenever a needle passes through a sandwich of layers, that division holds.
- Hold the span, not the spot. Fingers apart rather than crowded around the needle, a gentle tension across the fabric between them, and the needle coming up through the middle of that span. It feels like less control than pressing close, and it gives you a great deal more.
- Draw the thread only until the stitch seats. Once it lies down, it is done. Anything past that point is pulling the layers towards each other rather than sewing them together, and it is the other source of puckering, quite separate from the slack underneath. Firmness on the pull and looseness below tend to arrive as a pair.
- Settle it at the first stitch, because the back will not warn you. Puckers do not announce themselves while you work. The top looks well, the rhythm feels good, and the gathering underneath accumulates a little at a time until you turn the quilt over at the end and find it waiting for you. At that point the only remedy left is unpicking. So the habit has to be right from the beginning rather than adjusted along the way.
I find this a lovely thing to know, because it moves the attention onto the half of the work that usually receives none. We learn the visible hand, we watch it, we practise its rhythm, and the quiet one underneath is left to improvise. Give it a job and a position and the back of the quilt begins to look like something you chose, rather than something that happened while you were looking elsewhere.
If you quilt by hand, I would love to know where your lower hand sits, and whether somebody told you or whether you worked it out for yourself by turning a finished quilt over. Tell me in the comments, I always enjoy reading them.
