How to Press Quilt Strips

Video Transcript

JEANETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeanette White for Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts is located in Salt Lake City in Sugarhouse. And today, we're making a basic 16-patch. I've already stripped--pieced my two pairs together. And now, I've brought them together in a center seam. I want to talk about proper pressing because it is so important. We, first of all, are going to press the seam allowance toward the dark. In quilting, we don't press seams open. We press them together. The reason we do that is strength. So I'm first giving this a press just this way because it sets the stitching into the fabric and it smooths everything out. Now, I'm going to be pressing the seam allowance toward the dark, so I want the darker of these two pieces on the top. So I'm going to open this up. I'm going to smooth it with my hands, so that I can really feel that the seam allowance is pointing toward the darker of these two fabrics. This little part on an iron is extremely important. It's right this ridge that goes right along here. And on these little irons that we carry here at Piper's, I just love these because they are made specifically for quilters. And this little area right here is really sharp. So I'm going to push down just slightly and I'm going to move forward and then I'm going to hold it. Now, this is very different from what we've all been used to doing before which is ironing. This isn't ironing; this is pressing. And the difference is that we are using a minimum of motion. We want to really flatten this out and smooth it out, but we want to do it without stretching because when we stretch then it makes it really hard to put this together. So now, I've got this nice and pressed and flat, and I'm ready to move on to my next step which will be cutting these into segments and then putting them together so that I can make my 16-patch.

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