Why Quilts Pucker And How To Stop It

Stop Puckering In Straight Line Quilting.

Drag in your quilting makes the quilt look old and shabby. If you’ve noticed puckering or drag in your quilting before, use these tips to help you avoid that drag and create smoother, neater quilting. Quilts pucker because a three layer sandwich doesn’t move under the sewing needle all as one, flat piece, spoiling a beautiful quilt top that was spent so time creating.

 

 

Quilt drag is a sort of puckered, pulling effect that happens when the top layer of the quilt sandwich is shifting as you quilt along, resulting in drag lines between quilting paths. Sometimes it’s the sewing machine that creates problems when you quilt your straight lines traveling in the same direction. Taking a practice quilt sandwich to a sewing machine shop to test out some straight lines might prove where the problem lay.

Rachel Hauser, author for Craftsy mentions adding more quilting. Using dense quilting to create a distinct texture will draw attention away from quilt drag and puckering. Quilt drag is much more noticeable in large spaces between stitch lines.

Puckering occurs when one layer has more fullness than the other quilting stitches create tiny pleats in the fabric. Rachel suggests using a walking foot is essential to feed all layers of the quilt sandwich under the needle at an even rate.

Some solutions suggested are to reduce presser foot pressure and increase stitch length, and how to avoid over-stretching the backing when taping it down for Quilting.  Rachel has a number of suggestions that are quite simple for any quilter to try.