Quilting Techniques and Tips | Sewing Blog
ByCaroline Fairbanks-CritchfieldUpdated on
Learn how to quilt the clamshell quilting design easily and make it pretty using quilt templates or rulers, or using no rulers at all. Let me show you how I quilted different sized clamshells using 3 different quilting rulers – plus I’ll share tips for quilting pretty clamshells without a quilting template. Quilt clamshells with ease!
Hello quilting friends… Let’s get back to our quiltalong! I know you want to finish your Color By Number quilt, and so do I. This week I created the video in advance because my kids are out of school for Good Friday, and I didn’t want crazy teenager noises in the background of the video, lol!
I’ve been waiting for the right chance to quilt clamshells, and this is it! In our Week 10 video, I quilted three different sizes of clamshells, and shared lots of tips along the way, like:
1. Let the size of your block (or area to be quilted) help you determine what size clamshells to quilt. For example, 1’’, 1 1/2’’, and 3’’ clamshells look great in our 4 1/2’’ block because we can easily quilt whole clamshells or 1/2 clamshells, but 2’’ or 4’’ clams wouldn’t fit so well and might get frustrating.
2. Make good use of the lines on your quilting rulers. Counting down, the first line from the top shows you where the seam line or the top of the preceding row of clamshells should be. The second line down is 1/4’’ away from that and helps when quilting on the edge of your quilt.
3. If you don’t want to use a quilting ruler, you can still calculate the number of clamshells in each row. The most common ratio for clamshells is 1:2, meaning it should be 1/2 as tall as it is long. So in this block I drew horizontal lines 3/4’’ apart to help me make my clamshells the right height. Then I fit three 1 1/2’’ wide clamshells in each row (or 2 half clams and 2 whole clams which equals 3, right?).
Quilting 3 different sizes of clamshells was so much fun and gave me lots of variety in the blocks that I quilted this week. I hope you enjoy quilting them as much as I did!
The Week 10 Color By Number video should start playing in the video player on this page automatically. If it doesn’t, you can find it on my YouTube channel here.
In this video, I used:
The clamshell ruler from Sew Steady Template Set #1:
See all of the videos for our Color By Number Quiltalong here!
xoxo,
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