Methodist knot tutorial

I learned the Methodist knot method of utility quilting from the book Rotary Riot: 40 Fast & Fabulous Quilts by Judy Hopkins and Nancy J. Martin. Someone in a quilting group kindly sent me a set of photos of various utility stitches in that book, and this is the second one I've tried after crowfooting.  I choose it for the wheelchair quilt as the top was so busy that I felt crowfooting would be fighting with it, and indeed the Methodist knotting fitted in beautifully.  

Here is the wheelchair quilt enjoying some sunshine and being photobombed by a painted lady butterfly.  There were dozens of them in the garden, enjoying the first sun in two and a half days of solid rain.  They mobbed the buddleias, sunbathed on the wall, and pairs of them danced together.  It was spellbinding.

As with crowfooting, this method is very gentle on the hands, even if you are disabled, and it's quick to do.  You don't need a quilting hoop or frame, and I find it comfortable to do Methodist knotting while sitting in bed.  When I did a row of big stitch quilting around the edge of the quilt at the end, to give the binding more definition, I noticed how much harder it was on my hands with such a thick quilt, and was very glad I'd chosen Methodist knotting for the rest.

The stitch is a little less obtrusive than crowfooting, looking like an exclamation mark.  It complements the wheelchair quilt top without overwhelming it. The coppery variegated embroidery thread I chose (DMC 4130) shows up just enough to be interesting, and echoes the burnt orange flannel used for the backing and self-binding.

I went for three strands of embroidery floss as perle #8 didn't come in that variegated colour, and it behaved reasonably well.  You could also use perle #8, which would behave impeccably, and if you can manage to hide your knots without leaving visible holes, perle #5 could look stunning.

A #7 embroidery needle worked well here, and now that I am using #7 short darners for my crowfooting, I'd probably choose those instead.  They're the same diameter and also have an eye that is big enough to thread comfortably without being so big that the thread falls out, but they're a little longer.  If you are going to space your stitches much further apart than I did (which was 1"), try #7 long darners, or if you want then several inches apart, look at doll/soft sculpture needles.

As with crowfooting, this stitch can be used as a replacement for tying a quilt, which seems to be how it is traditionally used, or spaced more closely and used as a quilting replacement.  I spaced my stitches 1" apart and my rows 2" apart, and it reads as somewhere in between tying and quilting, I think.  This was a very thick quilt, with two layers of Polydown batting and a flannel back, so it looks very puffy, and you get a nice channel effect between the rows.  

My rule for these utility quilting stitches is to make sure the distance between rows is a minimum of double the distance between stitches, for them to read properly as rows.  The constant back and forth of the backstitches means the stitching is nice and secure.

If you are Methodist knotting a quilt that has an ordinary batting, you could possibly layer and secure your quilt as if for basting, then go straight into the Methodist knotting and skip the basting.  I was going through a very thick quilt, so I thread basted as usual, and was glad I had the flexibility to move the quilt in my hands while working on it.

You can space your stitches by eye, or mark them up in advance.  I made myself a little template with gridded acrylic and marked two stitches for each 3" half-square triangle, making the lines for the stitches a little over 1/4" long, and using Crayola washable marker pens.  Experiment on a trial sandwich to find which stitch length works for you, making sure your stitch that goes through to the back shows up there.

There are the instructions from Rotary Riot.  I spent a while staring at them in bewilderment, so here is a series of photos breaking it down further.

 1. Tie a knot in your thread 1/2" to 1" from the end, with two wraps if it's perle #8 or three strands of embroidery floss, and one wrap if it's perle #5.  By now I've had one knot pop out of this quilt and have to be sewn back in, so I reckon the longer tails will help keep it better secured. Insert your needle into the quilt 1/2" to 1" away from your stitch, in the direction you are coming from.  Take it through the batting, without going through to the back, and bring the needle out between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way along your marked stitch, here shown with a black marked line.

 2. Pull the thread through, here shown just before you bury the knot.  Pull the knot through with a sharp tug, using your other hand to hold the quilt nearby to make it easier to pull through.  Rub your thumbnail over the hole left by the knot a bit, and that should move the fibres back together so that the hole is gone.  (It's much trickier to do this with perle #5, and it probably depends on the weave of the fabric.)

3. Push your needle down, all the way through to the  back.  This is the only time your thread will go through to the back of the quilt, and you can feel to make sure it's going through with your non-dominant hand, which is under the quilt top.  If your batting is thin, you can take an ordinary backstitch without fuss.  My batting was very thick, so I had to angle the needle straight down at the start of the backstitch, as you do when making rocking stitches with traditional quilting.

 4. Make a backstitch, going through all the layers, and bring your needle out at the front of the marked line, so that it is coming out a little ahead of where the thread is currently coming out of the quilt.  Pull the thread through.  This is your first backstitch, and is the long backstitch. It produces a single straight stitch on the back.

5. Put the needle back in at the point where the long backstitch started, where the long and short backstitches meet.  This will be your short backstitch, and will only go through the batting.  It will not go through to the back.

 6. Travel your needle through the batting and bring it out in your next stitch, 2/3 - 3/4 of the way along the stitch, ready to begin the long backstitch for your next stitch.  In this photo, I have turned a corner with my quilting line.  You have now finished one Methodist knot stitch and are starting the next.

7. To end a line of stitching, when you are finishing your short backstitch, put the needle in at the point where the long and short backstitches meet, travel it through the batting only, and bring it out 1/2" away.

8. Tie a knot, insert the needle back in exactly where it came out, go through the batting only, and bring it out 1/2" or so away, angling it in a different direction this time. This will make it easier to pull the knot through and get it hidden beneath the top.

 9. Pull the thread through and give it a tug to bury the knot.  Here you can see it just before the knot is pulled through.  Rub your thumbnail over the hole to make it disappear as before.  Snip the thread where it comes out.

In other wheelchair quilt news, the Robert Kaufman Shetland flannel (herringbone weave, pumpkin colourway) was as divine as expected for the backing, and makes a nice self-binding as well.  The whole thing is wonderfully cosy, and while it's not yet cool enough to be needed as a wheelchair quilt, it's a great small-but-warm extra layer to keep around the flat, for instance if I'm colder in bed than my partner is.  I'll do something cunning with velcro for attaching it to the wheelchair footplates when the weather gets cold.

Wheelchair quilt: planning and piecing

It's ridiculous how easily I get chilled, so I've decided to make myself a wheelchair quilt.  I do have something already, a length of black polar fleece folded over double.  Only it always blows up in the wind, and it's hardly inspiring, and tends to get lost in the cupboard and never used.  For this quilt, I plan to do something nifty with velcro so that I can easily attach it to the footplates, and the quilt will moonlight as an extra layer to grab for the bed or sofa when needed. The fleece is a good size, 36" x 30".

There were lots of triangular bits left over from the stripes I used for R's bedspread, due to cutting all those quarter-square triangles, so I went for 3" half-square triangles (HSTs), with random placement.  I've fancied doing a randomised HST quilt for a while, and when hunting through photos of quilts made with striped fabrics on Pinterest, came across the 80s and 90s quilts of Michael James, which helped me visualise it.  I still have a bag full of scraps, but a lot of them made it into this quilt, and it was surprisingly easy to mark up and cut.  It took only a few days to cut the 238 triangles required, and then a day for putting them up on the design wall, staring at it, and rearranging until I was happy.  I've never designed a quilt top so fast, it's amazingly liberating, and everyone has been blown away by it.

Nifty, eh?  I cut most of the pieces before I started to arrange them on the wall, then cut the last few based on what I felt it needed.  They're almost all Kaffe Fassett woven stripes, plus a Peppered Cotton in green.  I'd put in one in rust, too, but it looked oddly dirty next to the stripes.

There's a little mini design board on my sewing desk, made from polystyrene board and some batting, and that's enough to hold 20 of these blocks at once, so I'm transferring a sixth of the top to that at a time for piecing, and have made the first section.  I photographed it and refer to that, and still ended up with one block rotated by 180 degrees, but it's a flexible design and it looks fine.  The blues and greens are the ones I'm pickier about.  What is really striking is how much smaller the pieces are when sewn.  It's only a 1/4" seam allowance, but the area ends up 40% less.  Here's the mini design board with the blocks on the left sewn.

Robert Kaufman Shetland flannel

This quilt is intended to be small but really warm.  I'm going to use two layers of Polydown, a fairly high-loft batting, and a Robert Kaufman flannel on the back, one of his Shetland flannel range in a gorgeous herringbone weave and the "pumpkin" colourway.  I've got quite a few of these flannels tucked away in my stash, as I have plans to make some heavy quilts in the future.

The next question is how to quilt it.  Crowfooting would be too busy, and while I may be up to big stitch quilting on the right combintion of fabrics and batting, this isn't that.

So I looked at the tacking stitches available again.  Cross stich has never really appealed to me, and neither does the Mennonite tack, which forms an elongated cross and looks a bit too religious for my taste.  I'm not from a Christian background, and probably wouldn't want it on my quilts even if I were.  (This is also why you won't see me doing the cross blocks popular in improv piecing.)


The stich I've decided on is the Methodist knot.  There are instructions for all of these tacking stitches in the book Rotary Riot, by Judy Hopkins and Nancy Martin, and someone was kind enough to send me photographs of the relevant pages.  I believe they can also be classified as a form of utility quilting, and tacking doesn't seem quite right to me, it sounds too much like basting when it's a permanent form of stitching, not to mention that I'm spacing it relatively closely.  This knot is formed by making two backstitches, one long and one short, looking rather like an exclamation mark and leaving a single horizontal stitch on the back of the quilt.  I've made up a sample sandwich and it works out nicely, with a surprising amount of texture and direction added by the lopsided stitch.  There's a lovely variegated DMC embroidery thread in copper/rust tones which looks perfect against the quilt, and groups online tell me I should be OK using embroidery thread, though I'll test first in case of bleeding.

I'll stitch a line down the centre diagonal of each triangle, which will bring out the pattern and mean that my lines of stitching are a nice 2" apart.  After drawing it out at full scale, I think I'll go for two stitches per triangle rather than three, though both look good.  The spacing on the samples are closer, more like how it would be with three stitches per triangle.  It still obeys my rule of doubling the distance between stitches for the distance between lines of stitching at a minimum, and judging from my sample piece, will still create the effect of lines of quilting in terms of indenttion.  It's been suggested to me that it shouldn't be too dense anyway, in order to maximise pockets of air and thus warmth.

Looking up wheelchair quilt design online was an odd experience.  I picked up some good tips - back it with flannel so that it's warm and less likely to slip off, cut off the corners so they don't get caught in the wheels - but mostly I saw lots of waffling from people who have never used a wheelchair and haven't bothered to consult any wheelchair users.  You could practically make a bingo card.

* well over a foot too long and/or wide. Bonus points for being two feet too long!

* top of quilt drapes over the wheels so that they can't be pushed

* bottom of quilt trails on ground

* quilt has entirely eaten the wheelchair user

* headless model in photos

* remarks about how the quilt is needed "in case your skirt or dress rides up" (we can pick our own clothing and be sexy if we want to, OK?)

* "wheelchair bound" or "confined to a wheelchair" (it's not a bondage accessory)

* telling people to buy it for the wheelchair user, rather than being anything an actual wheelchair user would pick

* three quilt blocks and acres of border, leading to a rather odd apron effect, and always combined with an unbelievably twee design

* footplates entirely absent, and the grinning Random Old Lady Model wearing slippers

* size explicitly designed around multiples of a quilt block, rather than what will actually fit the user

* batting skipped, resulting in a quilt that won't be nearly warm enough (we tend to run colder than people who are walking about)

I ask you.  Thankfully I did chat to some quilters who are wheelchair users, and a few more people who have worked with wheelchair users and respect us, rather than the dreaded "well I made quilts for an old people's home once" ones.  It's always depressing how many people think they should get cookies for merely knowing someone disabled.  We're a sixth of the population!  Of course you know some of us!  And if we say we want batting that dries quickly in case we get caught in the rain, we do know what we're talking about!