Pressing Quilt Seams To Ensure Quilts Blocks Are Strong And Flat

And To Prepare Blocks For Sewing And Quilting

It’s important to set your seams by pressing with a hot iron, before pressing the seam to the dark side. Utilize these pressing techniques to ensure the blocks in your quilts are the same size and your quilts finish strong and flat.

 

 

In most cases seams should be pressed to one side, so that when blocks are sewn together you can easily nest them. When seams cross they are pressed in opposite directions whenever possible, in order to make matching them up easier, resulting in perfectly matched points. Be sure to set the seam before pressing in any direction.

Pressing seams in one direction creates a ‘ditch’, and it becomes important when you’re ready to quilt, making it very easy to stitch into the ditch. Even if thread color is slightly off, stitching in the ditch when a quilt block has a raised side, is so much easier, and ensures a neat finish.

Dana Jones of National Quilters Circle explains that when pressing seams open you will find that you need to pin every seam together to get them to line up, which is very time consuming, and even doing so, you will find it near impossible to get a perfect seam on all the pieces!

In her video, Dana covers everything you need to do when pressing quilt blocks to keep blocks the same size and to prepare them for beautiful quilting results.