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Locking stitches and hopping to another spot..


Sheagatzi

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I have no idea what it's called.  I have a quilt with a clamshell/sashiko design,  and in certain areas are some appliqué circles that I have to either 'hop' over to the other side or stop, lock stitches, tie off/bury threads,  restart on other side of appliqué shape.

 

Have you locked stitches and then just hopped over without cutting threads?   (cut later?)  How do you approach this kind of thing? Is there some kind of youtube/tutorial that you know of that I can watch it done in action?   I saw on green fairy quilts youtube video (she did a diamond pattern) where she did this kind of hopping..but it was so quick, I could quite get it.

 

How many tiny stitches do you take before you are confident that they will stay in place before 'hopping' to the next spot.  I've done a practice of it and my 6 tiny stitches in place still don't seem very secure.   -  when I trim the top threads and then flip to the backing side and trim - there seems to be a bit of stitching coming undone.  

 

When you trim locked stitches,  do you snip the thread above the little knot that sometimes comes up, or below the knot?

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I tend to get a lot of appliqué quilts where customers want crosshatching behind it.  I tried, on a few blocks of my first one, to lock some stitches and then hop to the next spot.  You know what ends up happening?  You have to deal with those threads later on.  If you haven't done a good enough job of locking those stitches down, you're going to have a problem, because you can't tie a knot and bury the thread if the ends won't stay.  I decided not to be lazy (I thought of this as me being lazy, I'm not judging), and to deal with the threads as I went.  I think, in the long run, it's just easier to take care of them NOW.

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I agree with Linda's great advice.

Another option if you have only a few hops to make over an applique is to stitch around the applique as you go, to get to the point on the other side. This assumes you will being outlining the applique either before or after the background quilting. I say only a few hops because you don't want excessive thread build-up around the applique. 

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I have done it the way you mentioned, with the locking stitches and the jump threads. If you do a good job of locking your stitches, you shouldn't have any problem. Dawn Cavanaugh showed how to do that, with VERY tiny stitches for the beginning or ending of the lines of stitching. If you do very long jumps, you risk the machine hanging up on the jump threads under the quilt, so I would only recommend this method for short jumps. Otherwise, I travel around the applique. I would rather do this method, and outline the applique even if that wasn't in the quilting plan, because in the end it saves a lot of time over knotting and burying threads.

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