A Badge of Honour

Labeling my quilts has always been a struggle for me. Making up a name for the quilts wasn't such an issue for me, but finding a simple but elegant and informative way to get the information onto the quilt proved my Achilles heel. In the past I've tried a few methods- hand embroidery and once machine embroidery when I was able to play with Dallas's crazy fancy machine. But neither of them really did it for me, because my hand embroidery skills are seriously sub-par, and my own machine doesn't have the skills to do machine embroidery...

With three quilts newly finished or almost finished, I knew I needed to find a better solution to my label issues. i knew I wanted something easy that I could do myself, because let's be honest, by the time I'm stitching the binding down on one project I've mentally already moved onto a new project! After doing some online investigations, I decided to use a modified version of this tute, a handwritten method I had heard about ages ago but never tried.

After some initial struggle with parchment paper and baking paper... FYI they don't stick to fabric when ironed... I re-read the instructions and headed down to my local grocery store to discover that Freezer Paper is actually a totally different product to the others I was attempting to work with, it is plastic on paper vs wax on paper... um yeah.

Because I wanted to use plain white fabric for my labels, and I didn't like how you saw a white"er" 1/4inch frame around it when you tuck under the edges to then blind stitch it down. Therefore, I modified the tute by adding a complementary border to the label piece - I just cut 1" strips and sewed them on like a log cabin block- ironing the seams away from the white fabric.

I then cut a piece of the border fabric the same size as my front piece and sewed them right sides together . A little snip into the backing fabric allowed me to turn the "block" right sides out, a little pressing and poking out the corners, et voila!

Noew to get them onto the quilts! (And yes, you read that right 2005-2010... my handmade smapler took 5 years to complete, I think the time taken is definitely worthy of a label in its own right!)