Stay Stitching to the Rescue!

There is an absolutely fabulous quilter, designer, and queen of mystery quilts out there known as Bonnie Hunter. You can see her website and blog posts at www.quiltville.com and previous mystery quilt patterns can be purchased from her website as well.

I have spent many years making her infamous mystery quilts. They start with a color palette release around Halloween and then continue with weekly clues starting the Friday after Thanksgiving and usually wrap up sometime in January. Her quilts are known for their scrappy nature and lots…LOTS of piecing. (Also, for me, some occasional sweary words and doubting your own ability to count. But, very much worth the effort.)

I have been quilting for 26 years and only learned about stay stitching in the last couple years. I owe this lovely nugget of technique to making many of these mystery quilts, that are typically pieced right to the very edge.

Stay stitching is a huge help when longarming a quilt of this nature. It is simply a straight stitch around the perimeter of the quilt at about ⅛” from the edge. You can also bump up the stitch length a bit. Stay stitching keeps the quilt edge from wanting to stretch or gasp pieces wanting to come unstitched. At ⅛”, you won’t need to remove it either; it will disappear into your binding.

This is my top from Bonnie Hunter’s Chilhowie mystery quilt from last year. Currently, getting stay stitching before I load it onto my longarm.

Make your longarmer happy and help improve the overall outcome of the quilting by stay stitching your heavily pieced quilt tops. 

Here is last year’s mystery quilt, Chilhowie. (Yeah, I was looking off into space.)