Inchie Quilts | The Book

Now that you’ve made a few Inchies (or maybe more than a few!), you’ve gotten the hang of the edge stitching and things are going along just swell, what happens when all of a sudden the edge stitching is just all wrong? You’ve checked all your machine settings (you did make a note of those when you figured them out the first time, right? ) and everything looks right, but the edge stitching on your current Inchies doesn’t look as good as some of the ones you’ve done before. What to do? Let’s do a little troubleshooting.

First, check your needle. You’ll see better results with a new, sharp needle, and remember that stitching around each Inchie is probably hundreds of stitches (maybe even close to a thousand?), and every other stitch takes the needle through two layers of fabric, one of fleece, and one layer of stiffener. Seems like all of that, multiplied by however many Inchies you’ve made with that needle so far, could dull a needle pretty fast. Changing your needle should be the first thing you try to improve the edge stitching.

If the edge stitching is still no good with a new needle, make sure the layers of each Inchie are bonded together securely. If the layers aren’t securely fused, the quality of the edge stitching could suffer. Re-fuse the Inchies with the iron if necessary.

If neither of the above seems to help, consider whether the Inchies have enough quilting on them to keep the layers from shifting too much during the edge stitching step. If the layers are shifting and being pushed about with the presser foot, the edges aren’t going to be easy to stitch, and probably won’t look as neat and trim. There’s not much to do about the quilting at this stage of the game since the Inchies are already cut, but it’s good to keep this in mind for the next batch, and being aware of the problem may help you to control the Inchies better to improve the edge stitching slightly on the current set.

If you’ve tried everything you can think of and you’re still not getting the results you’re used to, take a close look at your Inchie and backing fabrics. If the fabrics are more loosely woven than normal, this could be the problem, and there’s really nothing to be done about it except to choose a fabric with a higher thread count next time. Try to stay away from very loosely woven cottons that have a low thread count. As a general rule, first quality printed quilting cottons are just fine for Inchies, and batiks work really well since they are even more tightly woven.

I hope this gets you back on track if you have the edge stitch blues!